Mansfield Town’s skipper Krystian Pearce labelled his side’s 1-1 draw with Lincoln City as a ‘point gained’ rather than two dropped.
The Chief, as he has been anointed by the Stags’ faithful, took little time in opening the scoring as he met Mal Benning’s corner to notch his second goal of the campaign.
But striker John Akinde levelled up proceedings for the visitors in the second period with a spot-kick to ensure that the Imps would take a point back to Lincolnshire.
Subsequently, Pearce wanted to extract as many positives from Monday evening’s encounter with Danny Cowley’s charges.
“In hindsight, it’s always easy to look back on a game and say we should have done this or that,” he began.
“But overall I think it was a good performance. We have to look at it as a point gained rather than two points dropped.
“Maybe not right now, but tomorrow when we look at the league and see us back in the top three, we’ll look at it as a positive then.
“That was the big thing for us – it’s in our hands now so all we can do is focus on what we’re doing.
The centre-half, who completed another solid shift at the heart of the Stags’ back three, was left evidently disappointed as Mansfield were denied a clean sheet.
“To concede the way we did it’s a bit disappointing but we have to take the positives. We’re back in the top three and I think it’s eight games to finish off the job.
“To get a goal early it has set the tempo for the game and we’ve tried to build from that.
“We worked on our set pieces and it worked for us today.
"But overall I think it was a good performance. We have to look at it as a point gained rather than two points dropped."
“They’re top of the league for a reason – they’re a strong team who are hard to play against but we matched them throughout the game. Unfortunately, though, we couldn’t get the three points.
“We take pride in our defensive record, so it’s always going to be disappointing to concede, but that’s football.
In conclusion, the 29-year-old remained in high spirits with the final furlong in Sky Bet League Two slowly moving into view.
“We feel good, we feel like we’re going to finish the season strong but we go again on Saturday.
“We felt comfortable throughout. Sweeney rightly so got man of the match and Preston was solid once again so it was a pleasure to play alongside them.
“I take each game as it comes and focus on the job at hand.
“I think with teams in the bottom half they try and nullify what we do, rather than attack us, whereas teams nearer the top tend to leave gaps for us to exploit.”
iFollow Stags subscribers can watch the defender's interview in full by logging into mansfieldtown.net/ifollow later tonight.
