Mansfield Town

Manager Adam Murray believes our team’s own mistakes were the biggest contributing factor in today’s 1-0 defeat to bottom-of-the-table Hartlepool United.

The Pools moved to within a point of safety in Sky Bet League Two thanks to a penalty by Brad Walker just two minutes after the re-start.

Our team also had to play for half-an-hour with 10 men as Junior Brown was shown a straight red card for accidentally colliding with the goalscorer with an alleged ‘high foot’.

“We beat ourselves,” said Murray, who was speaking in his post-match interview. 

“In the first half, we dominated. We knew that we would wear them down and that chances would come, but you can’t start the second half and two minutes into it give away a penalty and then go down to 10 men because it makes it even more of a struggle.

“We knew coming here that it was going to be a really tough game and we made it even harder for ourselves.”

He continued: “Even [at 1-0 down and playing with 10 men] I still felt that we had chances to nick something from it, but we didn’t stick to doing the basics as well as you need to do when you come to places like this.

“We shot ourselves in the foot today.”

Our manager hasn’t yet made a decision on whether or not the club will appeal against the red card that Junior Brown received on the hour mark.

“He’s obviously not gone to hurt the player. He’s gone for the ball and the lad’s head is down,” said Murray. 

“Intentionally he’s not gone to do what he did and the referee has said that he’ll have a look at it, so hopefully he’ll show some common sense because it was a tough one [to take].”

The boss added: “We’ll have to look at it and see how it appears in the footage [to decide if we appeal] because that’s obviously what will matter, but in those situations where the ball does bounce and you’re trying to hook it on, you can’t pull out of the motion of going for the ball that quickly.”