Jim Bentley: Morecambe dressing room ‘devastated’ after conceding a late leveller
Morecambe boss Jim Bentley admitted he was ‘gutted’ to see his side suffer injury-time heartbreak for the second home game in succession after drawing 1-1 against Braintree Town on Saturday.
Bentley’s players had looked set for a third successive National League win through Jack Nolan’s late penalty, only to be denied by Lewis Walker’s 97th-minute leveller.
After York City beat the Shrimps with a 99th-minute goal in their previous match at the Mazuma Mobile Stadium, Bentley admitted that football can be ‘cruel’.
He said: “I’m absolutely gutted and to drop two valuable points from the position we were in was hard to take.
“The game can be cruel at times and the changing room is devastated because it feels like we have been defeated.
“It was a tentative game and I don’t think we were as good as we have been in recent weeks.
“I don’t think we passed it well enough or dropped on enough second balls as we have been doing, but I think we had the better chances.
“When you take the lead in the 85th minute, it looked like we would get the points – and we had a couple of opportunities to kill them off – but we couldn’t finish the game off.
“We dropped our guard right at the death and it proved costly – and I have to ask how their striker got so much space in the box at the death.
“We were so close but we should have won the game from the position we had got ourselves into.”