Mansfield Town

Two goals in quick succession midway through the first half consigned us to a 2-0 defeat at Southend United yesterday, which means we are six points above the Sky Bet League Two drop zone with six matches of the season remaining.

“I said four months ago that this would go down to the wire and nothing has changed,” said our manager. “When you’re down there [near the bottom of the table] confidence suffers. What we’ve got to do now is not feel sorry for ourselves, because we have to go again.”

Murray continued: “I think stability and consistency come hand-in-hand. I’ve said in my programme notes for Monday’s home game, we are in our situation because of the amount of disruption and change that’s gone through the club this season.

“We’ve obviously had a change of manager, we’ve had staff leave, we’ve had ridiculous amounts of players, too many loan players and about four physios, so there has been a ridiculous amount of change at the football club.

“You put that into consideration with the style of play and the routines we’ve tried to change with the lads and it’s adding to the challenge that we’re in. But we can’t afford, at the minute, to sit back and go ‘This is not fair’. We’ve got to stand up and we’ve got to fight.

“The realistic of the situation is the facts of the matter that we’ve got to deal with. Nobody is going to say ‘You’ve had to deal with that this season, here are three points’ – it doesn’t work like that.

“As long as we put performances in, show commitment and determination, I feel a million times more positive than I did this time last week [after the defeat to York City].”

Reflecting on yesterday’s defeat at Roots Hall, our boss added: “I don’t think anyone who was at the game can complain that we didn’t perform well. 

“The ingredients I asked for before the game, the boys gave. We gave everything that we could. If we’re being honest, we came up against a side that were a little bit better than us in certain areas.

“We matched them for large parts of the game and probably should have taken advantage of chances that we had. We didn’t and we got punished for little errors, like we have been for the majority of this season.”