Interview

Quesada-Thorn dissects second pre-season outing

Elian Quesada-Thorn offered his thoughts on our under-21s' 2-1 defeat away to Enfield in pre-season on Tuesday night.

"I thought it was a tough game," he said. "We played against a well structured opposition who had a game plan and knew what they were doing, but I feel like we dealt with the long balls well. They played a lot of direct play into our backline and we dealt with it well in both halves.

"Then it was about playing and it's a different surface to what we're used to but we kept going, we kept trying to create chances and we had a few chances to score, myself included.

"We're frustrated that we came away with the loss."

We put Enfield under plenty of pressure towards the end of the game with Elian contributing to the attacking side of the game.

"That's what we've been working on in training," he said. "The game plan is to score goals and we're an attacking team. We're frustrated that we didn't finish a lot of our chances where we could have, but it's an improvement from the last game in the second half.

"We'll carry on doing what we're doing in training and look forward to the next one.

"It's been a frustrating last few years for me with injuries and things like that, but I'm so happy to be back out there and proud to wear the shirt every game. It's a dream come true for me.

"Playing amongst a new group of boys, a lot of people have moved on from last season, now it's about creating a better chemistry with the team going forwards.

"There are a lot of young players coming up and I see myself as being one of the older ones in the group now, so I'm trying to step up and be a leader for them.

"In terms of goals, I just want to carry on playing consistently at under-21s level, see what happens and go from there. It's looking positive so I'm looking forward to it."