Sellés: We cannot make excuses
Rubén Sellés made no excuses for Southampton’s 2-0 home defeat to Crystal Palace, which left the manager ruing chances not taken in the first half.
Joe Aribo, Kamaldeen Sulemana and Theo Walcott all had good sights of goal before the interval, but Saints were unable to convert their control into a half-time lead.
Instead they fell behind nine minutes after the restart, as Eberechi Eze pounced to score from close range, as Saints lost momentum and Eze made them pay with a second goal midway through the second period.
“We came here with the idea to get the three points, to put in a good performance, to be aggressive in possession and against the ball,” Sellés said.
“I think we showed what we wanted to do. The players showed character in the first half, we had our situations to go for the game.
“We know we cannot make excuses from that. We have the situations and when we don’t score the situations, what we need to do is protect our goal as a team, for us to be together with the players and keep that clean sheet, but we didn’t.
“The game can go one way or the other, but we need to be sure that if we do not score, we don’t concede.
“We didn’t match the tempo in the beginning of the second half and unfortunately we conceded that goal and we started to be a little bit down. When we tried to challenge the game, we conceded the second one.”
Saints stay within four points of safety after Everton were beaten at home by Fulham, and Sellés remains upbeat about his side’s survival chances.
“We will keep going forward and we will keep fighting for every point that is in front of us,” he added.
“We will try to keep that winning mentality – I know we are not getting a lot, especially in the last games, but we are going to try to go for every game, try to win every game and try to compete at our very best.”
