Punishing pre-season season has hurt Wimbledon confidence

AFC Wimbledon manager Terry Brown. Photo credit: Joe Giddens/EMPICS

By James Cunliffe, Terry Brown admits Dons are down in the dumps after summer results Thursday, August 16, 2012
7:01 AM

Terry Brown has admitted that AFC Wimbledon’s pre-season programme was too tough and it has left his side low on confidence.

The won only two of their eight friendly games, conceding 20 goals into the bargain as kicked off their summer with a 7-0 drubbing against Reading and also lost to strong Preston North End and Portsmouth sides, plus a West Ham XI.

They opened their competitive campaign with a 3-1 Capital One Cup first round exit to Stevenage on Tuesday night and Brown knows he has a job on his hand to get his men right for their npower League Two curtain-raiser at home to Chesterfield on Saturday.

“We’ve got two or three days now to concentrate on Chesterfield and it’s my job to lift the boys,” the Wombles chief said.

“We’ve had a very stiff pre-season. If I look at the games we’ve had, we’ve played far too strong opposition.

“We’ll have a little more life about us in our first home fixture.

“Winning games breeds confidence and if you looked at the games we’ve had Preston’s first team, Portsmouth’s first team and Reading’s first team.

“We could have done with a slightly easier pre-season, but that’s down to me, I booked all of them. I can’t apportion blame on anybody bar myself for this start.”

Though Wimbledon were not expected to beat Boro on Tuesday, Brown confessed it will be hard for his players to snap out of what is already, at this early stage of the campaign, a slump.

He said: “When you’re trying to build confidence you tell them [players] positive things but, at the moment, we go into the [Chesterfield] game without winning for a month.

“It doesn’t matter what gobbledegook I tell them, they know that.

“In some of these [pre-season] games we’ve been skinned by the two Reading wingers and the two [Stevenage] wingers are much better than you’ll get in League Two. They are quality and I’ve got a centre half playing right back.

“When I get a settled back four we’ll keep some clean sheets.

“We are quite lively on the ball and we can score goals.

“It’s about me getting that back four right.”