Players delivered some home truths after poor Accrington defeat
The Guatemalan international spoke after MK Dons’ loss to Accrington on Saturday
The MK Dons players had stern words with one another after their 2-1 defeat to Accrington Stanley on Saturday night.
In the dressing room for nearly an hour after the full-time whistle before emerging, Nathaniel Mendez-Laing admitted there were some home truths delivered by both management and the players as they suffered their fourth consecutive defeat at Stadium MK, dropping into the bottom half of the League Two table with just a point from a possible 12 picked up of late.
Barely laying a glove on Accrington all afternoon, Dons allowed John Doolan’s side to cruise to their second win of the season and their first ever at Stadium MK, with the home side booed off the pitch at both half-time and the full-time whistle.
Speaking afterwards, Mendez-Laing said the post-match debrief was a fierce one, with the players delivering some home truths about their recent slump.
“We’ve had a heated debate in there amongst the players, it was nowhere near good enough,” he said. “We didn’t expect it at all. And these things need to be said, it can’t be the same voices every week.
“It doesn’t matter how old you are or how experienced you are, you have to say what you feel. We all want to help each other and want the same goal at the end of the day.
“There were a lot of opinions and views put across. It's constructive criticism and sometimes it needs to be heard. We’ll go away from this game, we’ll come back, analyse it and see where we went wrong.”
No stranger to working with Paul Warne, with the pair together at Derby County, Mendez-Laing admitted he felt he had let the head coach down after the defeat.
He said: “We’ve had many ups and down together, but I feel devastated that I've let him down today. I know what he can do as a manager, he can turn everything around. We need to regroup, move on from this and go again. I have full faith in what the manager and staff are doing here, and the players have to change the narrative now.
“It’s a tough one to swallow. It’s nowhere near the standards we set. To a man, we were miles off it competing, one-on-one duels, physically, they were better than us all over the pitch. They ran over us, they bullied us, better than us on the ball. That’s on all of us as players, nothing to do with the staff. It was nowhere near good enough.”