Defender John Dempster has admitted that our display in yesterday’s 4-1 loss to Hartlepool United at One Call Stadium wasn’t good enough.
The defeat, our first in a competitive match at One Call Stadium since January, saw us slip two places to fifth position in Sky Bet League Two.
Our team went behind due to Andy Monkhouse’s spectacular long-range strike, but all four goals that we conceded were from outside the area.
However, Dempster, who has figured in every match this term, believes that we never recovered from The Pools’ seventh-minute opener.
He said: “We had an early chance when Ryan [Tafazolli] hit the bar, but Hartlepool scored a cracking goal and we didn’t really recover from it,”
“It’s difficult to talk about it, but we were second-best all over. You don’t want to make excuses, but we just weren’t good enough.
“There’s no point getting too disappointed, because we’ve got a lot of important games coming up, but as a group we know we weren’t good enough.
“We’ve got to put things right, and we’ll look to do so, as soon as we can.”
Dempster added: “There’s going to be times during the season when you go 1-0 down, but you’ve got to react to it, better than what we did.
“We didn’t react in the right way – that goes for everyone – and we looked well off the pace, so we’re very disappointed.
“We’ve been on a good run and we’re sitting in a good position, but we’ve set some high standards of late, and we dropped well below them.”
Despite the loss, our centre-back had praise for The Pools, whom he believes deserve credit for their first away victory of the campaign.
He added: “You’ve got to give credit to Hartlepool. They came here, gave everything and did a job on us, which is the disappointing thing.
“We’ve made this a place where it’s hard to come and get any points, but Hartlepool came here and deserved to win.”
