Part of the preparations for the weekend visit of Colchester United has been a look back at the Tuesday night game against Mansfield, particularly the disappointing first half.
“I’m still massively disappointed with it,” manager Paul Simpson said. “It’s more the way we went about it than anything else that was the big disappointment.
“It was also a surprise, I suppose, because it’s not something we’ve experienced this season. We’ve gone over it, we’ve talked about a few things today [Thursday], and now we have to get back to the basics.
“What I’ve highlighted mostly is that some of the things that were missing require zero talent. It’s been the core message from me - let’s get back to doing the things that we’ve been doing really well consistently.
“The basics we’re talking about don’t have anything to do with talent. We have to start with being prepared to run, compete and show discipline with all of that.
“You’ve got to have a desire to go out there and do it right and, sadly, that was lacking for far too long in that game.
“That’s not taking anything away from Mansfield, because I thought they were very good on the night, but we certainly helped them by being as bad as we were.”
And on the response from the players, he commented: “They’ve certainly all acknowledged that it was nowhere near good enough, and that’s a starting point for us.
“They accept that they didn’t do it properly, but they’re also insisting that they have the desire to get out there and put it right. That’s all we can ask of them now.
“We can’t change what happened on Tuesday, and when I look back over the last three games we can pick things out. With Harrogate it was one of those anomalies where it didn’t happen for us, and we lost a game we should have won with the way it went.
“If we had won it, the Mansfield game wouldn’t have been such a big shock. Obviously we’re now in a situation where it’s three games without a win, but we have to remember that’s off the back of some really good results.
“It’s been thrown at me that these last three results are because we had a good victory over Barrow, but I don’t accept that. There’s been no relaxation or sense of the players thinking it was job done, or any rubbish like that.
“It’s unfortunate that we’re having this little blip that we’re facing at the moment. We’re still in third place, I’ve no idea how, but we are still there.
“However, before this little run we had a nice little gap to the last play-off place, but it’s all now very tight and condensed. There’s no need to get uptight about that, we just have to go again.”
And as with any season, it’s also an acceptance that there will be twists and turns along the way.
“It means you can be calm because you know it can happen,” he told us. “There are going to be a lot of things that will go on for every club between now and the end of the season.
“There’s no guarantee that we will stay in those top places, but we’ll keep working hard. We didn’t expect to be here at the start of the season, and it certainly wasn’t our remit to go and finish in the top three or get automatic promotion.
“The remit is to keep improving the football club, and we’ve certainly done that. What we don’t want is for the last 15 games of the season to become a huge anti-climax or we finish with a whimper.
“We have to give ourselves the best chance of achieving something, and the first one of these last 15 is Colchester, so we have to have our focus there.”