Manager Says-That Austrian defeat!

The Clarets slipped to a 2-1 defeat on Tuesday night in the first of two matches to be played on the current tour of Austria.

There was a welcome return for Robbie Blake from a groin injury and the team started and finished the match as follows:

Jensen, Foster, Caldwell, Jordan, Harley (Jones 65), Berisha (Elliott 46), Gudjonsson (J O'Connor 46), McCann (Spicer 46), Mahon (Duff 46), Blake 46 (Lafferty 46), Akinbiyi (Gray 46).

The defeat against Romanian side,Prefab Modelu was the Claret's first of the summer pre-season friendlies.Steve Cotterill however does not appear that worried after seeing his players make a defensive hash of the two goals conceded with an Harley own-goal and a Jensen blunder. Andy Gray did manage a consolation goal in the second half.

Steve had this to say to the Lancashire Telegarph

'At the end of the day it won't do us any harm to be beaten because in the second half we showed a good bit of fighting spirit when in a pre-season game it would be so easy for them to think, 'don't worry about this, it doesn't mean anything','

'We've made two individual errors, then all of a sudden we're chasing, we're getting uptight, their gamesmanship means they're going down at any physical contact and then we get frustrated.'

'For what I would call a foreign team I thought they were very direct, I thought they whacked everything from back to front.

'On any other day if we take a chance early on, even at 2-0 down you still thought we would come back and win the game, I felt.'

There certainly is a lot of rubbish spoken by some fans as they persist in their negativity and doom & gloom scenario. Its almost as though they are ready to pounce on any defeat to justify their anti-Cotterill stance. Thankfully they do seem to be in a minority and most fans are positive and refuse to have their spirits dampened by the negativity especially since we haven't even started the season yet!

Lets see what Friday's match against 2006 Cypriot champions Apollon Limassol brings tomorrow.