Soft set-pieces exposed Dons’ underbelly in defeat to Derby County

Set-pieces once again haunted MK Dons on Saturday as they struggled to keep Derby County at bay in a 3-1 defeat at Stadium MK.

Despite leading through Louie Barry’s superb solo effort just before the break, Dons conceded two minutes later when Hayden Roberts, who had already had one ruled out for offside, headed past Jamie Cumming to equalise.

James Collins the put the visitors ahead just after half-time when Dons struggled from yet another set-piece before Nathaniel Mendez-Laing sealed the points with 11 minutes to go.

Throughout the season, set-pieces have been Dons’ undoing but after four consecutive clean sheets, Manning had hoped his side had gotten over their shortcomings but was left to rue too many silly free-kicks conceded.

“We started to show progress recently with the clean sheets we had,” said Manning. “But Connor Hourihane has played at an extremely high level, but you'll always be frustrated at the mistakes.

“I'm more frustrated with how we're giving those set-pieces away. Cheap free-kicks shift momentum, Derby didn't have to do a lot to get the ball into our box.

“They had three shots on goal, we had more than them and that's the frustration. We allowed momentum to shift too easily, giving away needless set-pieces and not dealing with them well enough, and that has been the case too many times this season.”

Derby’s equalise came less than two minutes after Barry had fired Dons in front - a goal Manning felt was a real sucker-punch.

He said: “It was key, straight from kick-off pretty much. We have to do better to stop the corner - it was poor to concede it and we don't defend it nearly well enough. And when you don't defend it well enough, you leave yourself open.

“But we had enough set-pieces ourselves to cause more problems than we did as well. We have to suck it up.”