Havant & Waterlooville fell to their first loss of their pre-season campaign on Saturday as they travelled to the Bob Lucas Stadium to face National League side Weymouth. 

Although the game did not end in the way Hawks boss Paul Doswell would have hoped, he insisted the match was a positive 90 minutes. 

“I’ve really got to look at the first 65 minutes where I feel that we dominated the game for large periods. We changed our shape at the end just to get the young boys on and give everyone a chance which I think is right in pre-season. I think if that is a league game then we go on and dominate so it was a real good workout for everybody, I feel that the senior players did well today.” 

Doswell was also eager to express that the defeat will have taught a few players in his side a valuable lesson. “Football can be difficult and that is one of the things that we were talking about, it is important they learn and that they learn quickly because football is about levels, and I thought that first half in the first 20 minutes we were excellent.”

“I thought the first 15-20 minutes of the second half we had Weymouth camped in, but you’re going to struggle to keep a lead if you’re not going to attack the crosses. The bottom line is it was a good learning curve today, especially for the young ones, but there was a lot of very, very good performances.” 

The gaffer also expressed that a combination of the opposition’s quality as well as the tough pre-season routine contributed to a fall off in performance levels at the end of the match. 

“I think if you look at the first 70 minutes of the game before I changed the shape, and we haven’t worked overly much on the other shape that we changed to, we have also had two particularly hard training sessions this week. So it didn’t surprise me that we did not look good after 70 minutes, there was a 20-minute period in the game where we definitely dropped our levels, but that is to be expected in pre-season.

“It is only our third game, I think Weymouth have played a fair few more but I was really pleased with lots of it and not so pleased with others.” 

By Liam Rice (@Liam_Rice9)