Ryan Lowe admits Wigan’s defeat to Cardiff rounds off ‘tough week’

Ryan Lowe admitted Wigan’s 2-0 home defeat to Sky Bet League One high-flyers Cardiff had rounded off a “tough week” for his struggling side.

On the back of a derby-day mauling at Bolton last weekend and a Carabao Cup exit in midweek at the hands of Wycombe, Wigan – who also had Morgan Fox sent off – tasted defeat for the third time in the space of seven days thanks to Perry Ng’s goal and a stoppage-time penalty from Yousef Salech.

“It’s been a tough week, I’m not going to lie,” said Lowe. “I think we’ve probably given a good team too much respect, and they’ve got some good players, we know that.

“The goal we conceded early in the first half was very disappointing, we’ve got to get up to the ball faster.

“We know how they play, and we gave the players a game-plan in and out of possession, and we didn’t conquer that game-plan as we’d have liked. And when we did get after them, we turned over the ball too cheaply.

“Without going into it too deeply – and I will watch it back in the morning – I don’t think we were worthy of coming away with anything, to be brutally honest with you.

“At one point, we had a couple of set-plays, and we’re hoping it will fall to someone, and can we maybe cause them a problem? But we didn’t do nearly enough to take anything out of the game.

“What I will say is the lads are an excellent group – probably a bit too nice at times – and maybe I need to get into a few of them, to try to help them be a little bit better.

“It just brings us back down to earth a little bit about where we are, because we’re not there yet, in terms of trying to get up into the play-offs. I know some people might not like hearing me say that, but it’s the truth.

“When we lose games as we have done over the last week, it just shows the amount of work that needs to be done, and I’m not naive enough to think we are the finished article at the moment.”

For Cardiff, it was the perfect way to follow up their midweek Carabao Cup victory at Premier League Burnley.

“I think the game-plan worked perfectly,” said defender Ng, whose early cross was helped home by Smith to set the Welsh outfit on their way.

“The game on Tuesday gave us a real confidence, and I think you saw that in our performance today. I thought we passed the ball really well, our press was fantastic again, and Wigan couldn’t really get to terms with it.

“It was a brilliant performance all round, and another good away win. We were trying to go for the second to calm down a little bit, but it didn’t come, so we kept controlling the ball.

“Our play was fantastic; I think we could have been a little bit more ruthless up there and created more chances, but we’ll take the three points anyway.”