Dowie makes no excuses

Athletic’s first away loss of the season at Bristol City was summed up by Iain Dowie when he said, “We were rubbish. That was our worst performance for a long, long time. We were second best everywhere — I had to bite my lip in the dressing room to stop myself flying off the handle. We have to take it on the chin and come back strong, but it rankles that we lost our record in that way."


"We were very disappointing. There was a lack of creativity up front and we were all at sea in other departments, so on the night we just weren’t good enough. I can’t think of a better performance against us from a home team this year, but we should have coped better because we had spoken about how to stop them. It might have looked like we played for a point, but that’s just the way it panned out. We came to win but ended up defending all the time as our own play put us under pressure.”


The result means that Bristol leap-frogged the Latics and they dropped to their lowest position since Boxing Day. They now only have seven point cushion in the play-off zone.