York City players 'gutted' after narrow defeat to Eastleigh

A stale match was decided after a sensational free-kick from Michael Kelly, who had only been introduced into the match earlier for the injured Vincent Harper.

But a lack of chances for York made it difficult for Morton's side to claim anything from the match, despite Eastleigh not necessarily shining as the better side despite currently possessing a position in the Vanarama National League play-offs.

“The lads are gutted in there to be fair." Admitted Morton. 

"I thought we had a plan and a strategy to come and have a go at them, and we did, I thought we controlled most of the territory.

"We created more chances, it’s just a little loss of concentration in terms of three mistakes following each other and then a great free-kick from the lad.

"Obviously we were trying to go for it even more and then, we huffed and puffed but just couldn’t take our chance.

"I’m proud to bits of the lads, I said to them to just keep playing like that against a team whose very hard to beat here.

"They were complimentary of us at the end saying it is one of the hardest games they’ve had.

"We’ve got to be disappointed that we haven’t got any points but we can’t be too down, we’ve got to take the positives out of that and then go again at the weekend.

“That’s what it’s like when you’re playing against solid sides like this. They are up there, they’re organised you can see that.

"But I thought we tried to play a little bit more football today because of the set up and the system match up allowed us to do that.

"It was just disappointing that we didn’t take one of those chances in the first half because it would have been a different game.

“Obviously when they got that goal they sat in and they said they would’ve been happy with the point.

"So they didn’t want to come out and give us too much, and when we’re putting more bodies on space becomes limited, and then you’re just looking for a second ball or a scrap.

"Disappointed, we need to get better on the set plays because the amount of times we got set plays they just weren’t good enough.

"I think Mitch Hancox delivered the best one of the night. We spoke about it because we are chopping and changing now, it’s all good doing it once but we’ve got to make sure we get it right.

"You look at their delivery into the box compared to ours, it caused problems.

"We’ve got to get it right because if you look at the stats over the last four or five weeks we’re getting more free-kicks, more corners, we’re getting into areas we just need to be more clinical with our delivery in there.

“I think it’s been a regular theme, I know there has been games where we’ve sat off but we have been getting the ball into critical areas more than the opposition.

"I know sometimes we allow the opposition to have the ball but that was the flip side today, they were sort of waiting for us to counter.

"It was a great performance, it’ just a shame we didn’t get something from it."

Despite it being a difficult result to take, Morton was full of praise for their counter-parts, and particularly to Kelly who scored a brilliant goal in the 52nd minute.

Morton applauded the quality of goal but was frustrated with the defensive aspects, which resulted in Fraser Kerr giving away the detrimental free-kick and picking up a booking.

“We were out of position from the left side, he’s skipped past two players which we talk about all the time about not diving in.

"And then obviously Fraser has had to come out and commit. You’re sat there and saying three issues and they have a chance, and when you play a team like this it’s great quality and a great free-kick.

"That was the difference in the game.

“That’s what happens when you’re full of confidence.

"When you’re full of confidence things like that go for you, but we can’t feel sorry for ourselves, I’ve just said it in there.

"Sometimes I let the lads have a chat and tell us what they think but I said to them today ‘look I don’t care what you think that was a good performance, the fans will be proud of you and I’m proud of you’.

"We can’t just feel sorry for ourselves because we’ve got two games to go under this little short period of time.

"So it’s going to be tough but we’ve just got to go again."