Mansfield Town

Manager Adam Murray admits that he’s eagerly anticipating the opening of the transfer window in a few days time, as he looks to add some key ingredients to his squad.

Our boss was speaking in his post-match interview after today’s 2-0 loss away at Bury.

Goals either side of half-time by Ryan Lowe and Danny Mayor condemned us to defeat at the JD Stadium, which also means at the midway point of the campaign we occupy 17th position in Sky Bet League Two, having racked up 27 points from 23 games.

“As I’ve said before, there needs to be a realisation of where we are. Our situation at the minute is where we’re scrapping for every point.

“What people want and what I want, and the expectations that people have, at this time we can’t push them. We’re in a battle, we need points on board – the lads are aware of that, and that’s our main aim at the minute.

“It’s a horrible situation where if we’re being totally honest, everything – the situation with the group, the scenario, it’s lost one manager his job, so the realism is that there needs to be change.

“The sooner we can get some more ingredients in, the better.”

He added: “We’ve come to the halfway point and I’m going to do my best over the next two weeks to freshen things up, because I think it’s needed.

“Like I’ve said over the last couple of weeks, if [the club] had made an external change of manager, there would have had to have been freshness.

“There has to be a fresh emphasis put on the group’s energy, the atmosphere in the group has to be brought up another notch again and we need to do that.

“I’m not worried in the slightest because I’ve seen the good things that we do and I know that when we get these ingredients, we’ll be okay.”

Speaking about the game in more detail, he continued: “Obviously we’ve come away from home to what I believe is one of the best football sides in the league, who move the ball well.

“We knew that if we pressed from the off, we were likely to get picked off today, because from the work we’ve done on our shape over the last three weeks, we’re still a million miles away from where we want to be.

“The plan was to keep our shape in the first half and when we nicked the ball, see if we could punish them.

“I think at times we kept our shape, but the boys took things a bit too literally when we did win the ball as we didn’t want to go and hurt them.

“If we didn’t concede a sloppy goal, which was down an individual error, we’d have come in 0-0 [at half-time] against a team that’s just outside the play-offs.

“Then you look at things and our ‘Plan B’ so to speak, where we went to a 4-4-2 after 60 minutes – that was always going to be the case, but we expected to be in the game at 0-0 at that time.

“When we did that we created two or three chances where we’ve got to score. We flashed two across the goalmouth and they have to be goals.

“So individual errors [cost us] for the goals. You look at the flow of the game and how it went and if we’d come in at half-time at 0-0, I think we’d have got something.”

Murray added: “The first 45 minutes – I let the lads know at half-time, and again at full-time, it’s not what I’m about. I won’t have my teams going out and going through the motions.

“But like I said after the Hartlepool game, that’s the inconsistency of this group at the minute. We do all the preparation and all of the work, and the lads can’t be anymore prepared.

“Are these lads giving me everything? Yes. Is it enough? I think we need a little bit of help in there and we’re lacking a couple of leaders, a little bit of character, but more importantly a bit of nous, because when we put a game-plan together, if we haven’t got people that can carry it out, then that’s a problem.”