Lincoln City head coach Chris Cohen believes the Imps must find a way to be more aggressive after their 2-1 defeat at Queens Park Rangers.
City suffered their third successive Championship defeat at Loftus Road, despite fighting back from Richard Kone’s early opener through Dom Jefferies. Glen Kamara’s late winner condemned the Imps to another disappointing afternoon, with the visitors struggling to establish themselves for long periods of the contest.
City certainly showed glimpses of their attacking capabilities, but dropping too deep and attempting to survive against Championship opposition is becoming a recurring problem.
Reflecting on the performance, Chris acknowledged that City had improved after a difficult opening but had failed to maintain that momentum.
“Probably didn’t start the game as well as we would have liked,” he said.
“For the back half of the first half, the last 15 minutes, we got into a bit of rhythm, a bit of flow, worked out how to be aggressive against them and had a couple of nice counter-attacks. Obviously scored a really good goal.
“Come out and start the second half again with a nice bit of rhythm to us and then the game quickly got away from us. We went into survival mode that worked brilliantly well for us last year in terms of being in either a leading position or a position of drawing a tough game away from home.
“And it’s been too many times now throughout the first 15 games where survival is just not enough. We tried to help, we tried to change shape because we were so low and we could see there was a big opportunity in the middle of our penalty area.
“But again, our message over the next couple of weeks, you just can’t survive at this level by defending too low. We have to keep the aggression in the game. We have to try and punch back.
“We had a similar theme this time last year in League One, and we’ve got to find a way to punch back. We’ve got to find a way to implement what we want to be as an attacking force more often, more consistently throughout the course of the game.”
With the international break now providing an opportunity to assess the opening 15 matches, Chris told me that the performances had fallen short of expectations, particularly in both penalty areas.
“The goal felt like it was coming. We tried to help and then the chase was okay in terms of balls going into their penalty area and then just looking for the optimism.
“At the moment, Gary, it feels like performance this week hasn’t been good enough. That’s up to us to go and fix, most definitely.
“But these two penalty areas are absolutely everything in football matches and we’re conceding goals and chances that are unlike us historically over the last couple of seasons, and not being optimistic enough and creating enough volume around their goals.
“So it’s mine and Tom’s job to reflect, dissect, go away, work as hard as we possibly can to fix, because we can suffer defeats most definitely, but it has to be a performance that the supporters can walk away being proud of and probably over these three games, maybe that hasn’t been the case.”
The Imps now have the international break to address those concerns before returning to Championship action. For Chris and fellow head coach Tom Shaw, the challenge is to restore the aggression and attacking intent that have been missing for sustained periods during the recent run of defeats.
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