The Robins academy left the nest and made the trip to Reading as they met in FA Youth Cup at the Select Car Leasing Stadium, where Reading won 3-2 in a hard fought game.
George McNamee captained the Robins and reflected on the loss, saying “I think we came in to Reading knowing what we need to do. I think we needed to settle the nerves at the start of the game, it was more of a battle than it needed to be.”
McNamee continued, “We competed well and it was two unfortunate goals, but I think the boys did everything they could and they put a lot of work in especially in the first half.”
When speaking about Cheltenham’s preparation, the captain had this to say, “We were in the game the whole time, I think. We knew what we had to do, we had to kill them on the transition. The mentality was still there, we knew it was. We had to threaten them, but we just didn’t exploit them enough.”
“We fought ’til the end. This group has got great morale, and we have a lot of leaders in this team and everyone pushes each other. We can hold our heads high and say we’ve done all we could”, said McNamee proudly.
“It is a sore one to take but we are on a good run of games right now. We’ve got a lot of wins in the league and we just need to carry on this momentum and can’t let this loss take us down too much. Obviously in Youth Cup nights everyone wants to do well; the result just didn’t happen tonight. We just have to carry on; everyone in the team knows what they need to do”, the defender said.
The Robins are back to league action as they face Watford away on Saturday, 7th November. They sit in 12th, level on points with Watford in 13th. Cheltenham have a game in hand against Watford, with only nine games played.
