The Latics dithered to a 1-0 loss at Bristol Rovers on Monday and manager John Sheridan was disappointed with the result.
He said, “It was a disappointing performance for me. I am not going to be hard on the players as with two games to go, we have done well to get into the position we are in. Obviously, I would have liked to take something from the game. I would have felt that we would be definitely safe then. There is still the chance that things won't turn out the way we want them to, so we have to be careful of that. The performance was a bit flat and the pitch was beautiful to pass the ball on. There was a bit of urgency once they scored, which shouldn't happen. It shouldn't take 70 minutes for us to up a gear and once we did that, we caused them one or two problems. I made changes and with a lack of football, there were some players who I wouldn't say didn't turn up, but it was a below-par performance.”
“There was a chance for us to get something from it and we should have caused them more problems than we did. We had a few corners and should have been looking to do something different with them. We also had free-kicks in good areas. We are usually on our game and have a hunger about us. It just wasn't there. Results elsewhere weren't too bad for us. But we were 'nearly' doing this and that all game and I don't like that. We had a good performance against Bolton, but we were sloppy on a good pitch. There are no excuses. We were lethargic. We go into Rochdale which is a good game, a derby, and we go to try to win it.”