Mansfield Town manager Adam Murray says he wants to ‘draw a line’ under today’s 1-0 defeat to Newport County.
County striker Scott Boden’s 86th-minute winner was enough to secure three points for the Exiles on a testing afternoon in South Wales.
The winning goal was scored by the 26-year-old when he appeared to be stood in an offside position, but manager Murray admits that his side didn’t deserve anything from the match and wants to move on swiftly.
“[It was a] disappointing day at the office, I’m writing a line under this one because we haven’t got time to sulk about games, we’ve got to move straight onto the next one.
“I’ll analyse it but there’s going to be a rapid line under it because we haven’t got time to dwell on wins like last week, we moved on straight away, we’ve lost this one and we’ll move on straight away."
Murray continued: “There wasn’t a zest about us like there has been in the last seven or eight [games], so it’s onto the next one.
“The league is too tight to be spending time going over a loss, there’s got to be about eight or nine teams fighting for these play-off places, probably more than that. It’s going to be tough, we know it’s going to be tough so we can’t put performances in like today and think we can achieve that (a top-seven finish).”
The manager says the pitch, which was layered with thirty tonnes of sand during the week due to the heavy rainfall in South Wales, didn’t help either side but he feels his players couldn’t get into any sort of rhythm.
“It was one of them ones where, because of obviously the pitch, we tried to get the ball forward quickly, we weren’t doing that with quality and then when it was going forward, it wasn’t sticking – it was just coming back.
“It was just a ‘bitty’ game; there was no rhythm to it. We didn’t look like the team that we are. It was a scrappy game," Murray said.
“We had a few half-chances that we’ve got to do better with, Greeny’s (Matt Green) hit the post [in the] first half, Clemmo’s (Chris Clements) got to hit the target [in the] second half, we didn’t work the ‘keeper at all."
Returning winger Colin Daniel played 72 minutes at Rodney Parade before being replaced by Sean Kavanagh, and the gaffer says he needs to get his new signing match-fit after being out of the Port Vale side in recent weeks.
“I thought he did okay. I thought he looked like he hasn’t played for a couple of weeks, which we expected, so we wanted to get the minutes into his legs.
“The general way the game panned out, we didn’t get a lot of decent service forward. The ball was bobbling and bouncing everywhere, it must’ve been a horrible spectacle but we have to manage those games."
You can view Murray's post-match interview, in full, on Stags Player.
