The Latics poor home form continued on Saturday with a 1-0 loss to Port Vale, it was the club’s fourth home league loss. Frankie Bunn needs to turn things around sharpish as he is coming under more and more scrutiny as the season progresses. When Cheltenham Town visit tomorrow, nothing less than three points will be good enough to appease the frustrated fans.
Bunny said, “We’re disappointed, but there's always another game, we take the second half performance into Tuesday perhaps with finishing a few chances which we’ve had today. We’ve had a great result at Bradford and got beat narrowly today, so we’ve still got life about us and we'll roll our sleeves up and go again Tuesday. I thought the referee at times was poor today and he's going to have to hold his hands up, certainly on the Callum Lang one [penalty appeal]. There was a couple of other issues throughout the game, but we can't rely on the referee, but he did add to the few problems we endured. I can't legislate the penalty, I don't know what Peter was thinking about, it was a poor decision with the ball running out of play. We looked nervous first 15-20 mins, the penalty didn’t help, but we grew into the game second half and just couldn’t score, we threw everything at them. To be fair to them they got blocks on the line and we’ve hit the bar and should have had a penalty, but we certainly need to be more clinical in front of goal. As a frontman if you don’t score for a while you get a little bit edgy about it, but you have to remain calm and be ice cool in the box because they'll be another chance along the way which you’ve got to make sure you’re ready for.”
“We haven’t seen Sam [Surridge] since Bradford, he’s finished the game at Bradford running strong in the 94th minute and he hasn't appeared since, he's got a grade 1+ hamstring tear which will be between 2-3 weeks. We were missing Ishmael [Miller] as well, so a little bit of pace and power up there at times would have been helpful today. We lost Zeus [De La Paz] as well, again hamstring, it was an unfortunate accident in training where he's got his boot caught in the turf and Andy Taylor hasn’t recovered since his hamstring problem in the game against Bradford. The players kept going and they're fighting, but again the quality wasn’t good enough in the box and we should have got something out of the game again. We'll be motivated, and I think the players are good enough to bounce back which we've shown we can do in the past.”