Lee Glover has challenged his Derby County Under 21 side to show a reaction from their recent back-to-back defeats when they face Newcastle United this afternoon.
Lee Glover has challenged his Derby County Under 21 side to show a reaction from their recent back-to-back defeats when they face Newcastle United this afternoon.
The message comes after his side fell to a 1-0 defeat to Blackburn Rovers last Friday, but it was not the result that left the Senior Professional Development Coach disappointed.
"Last Friday was very disappointing. We have spoken about performance levels and not getting ahead of ourselves and for the first hour against Blackburn, we didn’t have a performance,” Glover told dcfc.co.uk.
“We have thrown everything at them in the last half an hour of the game, created numerous chances, but over the whole 90 minutes, we were disappointed.
“We got a little bit ahead of ourselves after winning at Newcastle a couple of weeks ago.
“We played well against Reading last week, but we didn’t get anything and football has a nasty habit of bringing you back down to Earth quickly if you get ahead of yourself.”
Derby, though, will have a quick opportunity to return to winning ways when they face Newcastle United for the second time this month in the penultimate Barclays Under 21 Premier League – Division 2 fixture of the 2014-15 campaign.
Peter Beardsley are expected to field a number of fringe first team players, like Siem de Jong, Adam Armstrong and Paul Dummett when they line-up at the Training Centre in partnership with the University of Derby later today.
Like Friday, Glover says it is not going to be the result that is important to him, but the performance and he insists his side are going to have to be much better than they were against Blackburn when they take on the Toon Army.
He added: “We need to have a reaction because Newcastle have got some good individual players.
“They are going to have players like Siem de Jong, Adam Armstrong and Paul Dummett playing; we know that they have a good squad.
“It’s going to be a hard game for us and we need to make sure that we raise our performance levels from what we produced on Friday.
“We are not worrying about the outcome or the result too much, but we pride ourselves on performance.
“We have now lost back-to-back league games, which hasn’t happened since around August-September time.
“We want to get back on track by doing things right and playing the high intensity passing game that we like to play.
"We have spoken about it as a group, we’ve trained well and we think the lads are getting their heads back to where they was before the Blackburn game.”