Walking through the corridors of Brunton Park these past few days has brought snippets of overheard conversations with a common theme – let’s make sure the reaction to Tuesday night’s defeat is a positive one.
“You have to be unhappy when you lose,” gaffer Paul Simpson insisted. “We can’t change it now, all we can do is make sure we do learn from it.
“It definitely isn’t a case of brushing it under the carpet, we’ve had a discussion around it this morning and we’ve talked about what it is that’s got us into the league position we’re in now.
“It’s now a case of what comes next. What do we do about it now. We can’t change it, we’re out of the Papa Johns, but now the focus has to be on a brilliant week ahead.”
“It’s Orient first, then it’s Stockport and Tranmere,” he added. “Orient are one of the early pacesetters this season, Stockport are one of the most fancied because of the bigger budget, and Tranmere are one of the form teams.
“We have a chance come the end of this month that we could be in a really good position. That’s the only thing we can focus on now.
“I went away and analysed what I’d done ahead of the Barrow game, and I thought about where I could have done things better, and I fully expect the players, because they are professionals, to have gone away and done that as well.”
Accepting that mistakes are part and parcel of the game, he said: “I’m always disappointed when I make a mistake, but all I can say is that I make every decision for genuine and good reasons.
“I never do things because it makes my life easier, and I always do what I think the right thing is. I said to the players this morning that I’ve made mistakes all season, but they’re the ones who have gone out and covered that up for me.
“Unfortunately on Tuesday I made mistakes, the players made mistakes, and we didn’t cover for each other.
“We’ve got ourselves into the position we’re in because we’ve been really together, we’ve worked extremely hard and we have real ability in there.
“At Barrow it didn’t quite happen and what we have to do is make sure we build on what we’ve done and think about what it took to get a win away at Hartlepool and Grimsby, and what it took to come from 3-1 down against Rochdale.
“What did we do to get an emphatic win against a team that are having problems, but I think Doncaster are going to be a very good side this season.
“Remember what we did to get ourselves into good areas and do it again, and again, and again. All good teams lose, I used the example of Man City in our team meeting, they lost last weekend.
“If they’re as good a side as we think they are they’ll react in the right way. We have to be the same. We have to react properly this weekend by putting ourselves in a good frame of mind to face a decent team.”
Managers and coaches tend to get a feel for the mood in the group from the training sessions leading up to the next fixture.
“They’ve been really good,” he told us. “I asked them the question to get them to think about what we have to do to get back to where we were before Tuesday and they were all very positive.
“They all understand where we let ourselves down as a group, and I do have faith in these fellas. I have trust in them that they’ll be able to go and respond on Saturday.
“It’s about being professional now through everything we do as we get ready for the Orient game so that we come out on Saturday absolutely flying and we give our supporters something to smile about.”