Tom Cleverley was disappointed with his team’s lack of intensity and ruthlessness in the final third as they fell to a 1-0 defeat on Saturday against Burton Albion.
Jack Armer scored the game’s only goal on 70 minutes, leaving Argyle to rue their missed chances.
Speaking after the game, Argyle’s head coach detailed his frustration with his side’s performance.
“I think the word certainly to describe the first half would be ‘flat’,” said Cleverley. “We don’t lose that many duels, we don’t lose that many second balls and we don’t have so little attacking play when we do the things we are good at, so I’m disappointed with that and we will be working on and addressing that.
“I can accept missed chances and I can accept balls given away, but I can’t accept a lack of intensity, especially not here [Home Park].
“It will be addressed. It’s a group of players that have had a really good spell and deserve a chance to react from this today. When we take our foot off the gas, or we come off our intensity, we are a lot less effective for sure.
“That’s nine out of ten games Burton have scored first so we knew how important the start was. I didn’t think we put them under anywhere near as much pressure as we normally do to teams here, but still we created the best chances in the game.
“The big thing for me is, how do we not lose those games? You can’t be at your best every game, so we are going to have days where we are off it a little bit, but those are the days you have to come away with the points.
“We just simply can’t lose that game today with the chances we had and the lack of chances they had.
“We need to come away from that with minimum a point, because then it feels like not such a stunt in momentum, we need to improve that.”
Cleverley thought better of the second-half performance, in part due to the introduction of substitutes Caleb Watts, Joe Edwards, Xavier Amaechi, Bradley Ibrahim and Mathias Ross.
In the second period, Argyle missed two significant chances to level the game after they had fallen behind. Two moments that could have potentially turned Saturday’s defeat into either a draw or a win.
Cleverley said: “I thought [the substitutes] brought energy and intensity, and that showed in the attacking play; we had ten shots in the second half as opposed to three shots first half.
“We know what we need to do to give ourselves the best chance to be effective. First half, we didn’t do it, the second-half substitutes brought that.
“Ultimately, we are paying the price for a lack of intensity and what happens in the final actions. They took their chance, and we didn’t take three or four big ones of our own.
“What I will say about the team is that they’re very good at reacting to these wake-up calls and then going on a run and not seeing a flat performance and understanding how we are at our most effective.”
Argyle will get the chance to react and bounce back when they face Leyton Orient in Sky Bet League One next weekend.
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You can watch Tom Cleverley's post Burton Albion press conference on Argyle TV, in full, here.
