Purches: We simply weren’t good enough (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

Purches: We simply weren’t good enough

10:20am Thursday 18th December 2008 in

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ORIENT skipper Stephen Purches has ordered the east Londoners to get their act together ahead of Saturday’s trip to Oldham.

The O’s saw their seven–match unbeaten run ended by a disappointing defeat against fellow League One strugglers Cheltenham, despite the visitors being reduced to ten men.

And Purches knows that Martin Ling’s men will have to put on a much better showing at the sixth placed Latics if they are to get their season back on track.

He said: “It was a hugely frustrating way to end what has been a good period of results for us.

“I thought we huffed and puffed against Cheltenham and on the day they just proved a lot more clinical in front of goal, because I don’t think they really had too many chances.

“If you look at the goals we are scoring I don’t think we are doing that ourselves, because we have been struggling in that area.

“Of course we were still massively disappointed to have lost our recent record in that fashion, although we have got to dust ourselves off because we’ve got a very tough game at Oldham.

“We have gone through what went wrong against Cheltenham and hopefully we have learnt from the mistakes we’ve made.

“Also having worked so hard to put a decent run of results together we don’t want them to dip off again.

“The good thing though about football is that we enter a busy period, where we have a lot of games and if we can put a string of results together it can lift us right up the table.”

The former Bournemouth defender also took the opportunity to dispel the theory that rumours linking Martin Ling with the vacant managers job at Swindon, as being the reason behind the O’s dour showing against Cheltenham.

He added: “That didn’t have anything to do with the result, because we haven’t been talking or thinking about what the papers are saying at the moment.

“As players we are just concentrating on our football and hopefully now we can put the Cheltenham performance behind us.”