Michael Duff ordered his Huddersfield players to “look in the mirror” after their Sky Bet League One play-off hopes took another dent with a 2-1 defeat at Wigan.
First-half goals from Dale Taylor and Owen Dale were enough to give Wigan three deserved points, although they had to dig in during the second half after Callum Marshall pulled one back five minutes after the restart.
Injury-hit Huddersfield remain in fifth spot in the table, but will drop out of the top six if teams below them win their games in hand.
And Duff wants his side to find the answers to their current problems from within.
Michael Duff
“We had a decent enough team out on paper, but I just think we looked a bit disjointed and maybe lacking a bit of confidence,” he said.
“The best teams suffer from injuries…you’ve only got to look at Manchester City, who have had a lot of injuries – and we’re definitely not Manchester City.
“We just have to keep grafting and we’re still fifth in the league, which is unbelievable really. But we do need a reaction to this, and find something….maybe for a goal to go in off someone’s backside, something like that.
“We need to be better in every department and not be looking for excuses and turning on each other. I need the players to look in the mirror now, because footballers being footballers they blame everyone else and I was one so I can say that.
“There are some good players in the group, but the performances need to be better. I thought the two goals on the night were terrible, I will say that.
“For the first one, we’ve let the ball go under a foot and the second one…there’s three men out there on the touchline, and we’ve allowed the winger to get his cross in.
“That should never happen and, when you add individual mistakes to being disjointed to lots of injuries, it becomes a difficult evening.”
For Wigan boss Shaun Maloney it was a welcome three points as Latics celebrated only their second win on home soil since the end of November.
Shaun Maloney
“The first half was amazing. The fluency of how the team played was as good as anything we’ve produced this season,” he said.
“And we were clinical, although I would have loved the game to have been dead by half-time because after 50 minutes, the game was definitely not dead.
“I’ve always felt the performance levels have been there, it’s just been how clinical we’ve been and we did that in the first half.
“We’ve not really had that for a lot of this season, but I do feel the squad is a lot stronger than it was four or five months ago and hopefully the more time these guys spend together, on the training ground and on the pitch, we’ll have more games like that.
“Once they scored there was definitely a 10-minute period when I think the game maybe could have got away from us, so I have to credit the players for that.
“The goal I didn’t like, we tried to fix that problem at half-time and obviously we didn’t, but in fairness to the players, we adapted tactically and how they adapted to that was all on them.
“We gave up the ball in the last 25 minutes, but we defended the space well and the substitutes all came on and made an impact.”
READ MORE: Dale Taylor and Owen Dale on target as Wigan beat high-flying Huddersfield
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