Club captain Paul Huntington spoke to us at Northampton on Saturday following our relegation back to League Two.
“We’re obviously very disappointed,” he said. “We came into the season with a lot of hope and we wanted to build on the good things we did last year, but that hasn’t been the case. The season hasn’t been pretty at all, and the dressing room is very flat at the moment.
“There’s not a lot you can say in the dressing room. We’ve got another four games, and we have to lift ourselves and show that we want to be part of it going forward.
“We’ve known this has been coming for a number of weeks if we’re being honest. It’s been about pride and giving everything you’ve got for the badge, for each other, for your family and for the fans.”
“I don’t think you can question the effort from the lads,” he continued. “I think it’s just been a lack of quality across the season, but it isn’t just that, there’s a number of reasons.
“We have to take responsibility and say as a collective it just hasn’t been good enough.
“There have been some games, not many, where we have put in performances that have been acceptable. There haven’t been enough of them, and they haven’t happened often enough. We’ve been far too inconsistent.
“We’ve had some better performances of late, against Stevenage and Peterborough, but it hasn’t happened regularly enough.
“By the time you get to the end of the season you normally find you end up where you deserve to be.”
“I think we owe it to the fans and to each other to make sure we do these last four games properly,” he commented. “The fans have stuck by us during the whole season.
“I’ve been at clubs before where they wouldn’t have been as understanding. No one is happy with the situation, and everyone is devasted in the dressing room as I’m sure everyone connected to the club is.
“It’s now about giving our all every day in training which for me is a given. Only everyone else will know if they’ve done that across the season, and whether they can say at the end of the season that they gave it everything they had.
“That shouldn’t be a choice, it should be a given, but it’s just about showing day to day that you want to be here and be part of it. Let’s be honest, everything apart from what’s happening on the pitch this season is really positive.
“The club are going in the right direction and this is obviously a set-back but in the long-term things are looking a lot better. It’s obviously a sad day for the football club but it’s now about bouncing back which will start next season.
“We’ve got another four games and we need to do everything we can to take some confidence and belief from those going into next season.
“There’s been a big difference between this year and last year. We had that winning feeling last year and we knew how to win games, but that has obviously changed this year. We’ve lost far too many games, and we need to sort that.
“I’m sure there will be big changes in the summer, we don’t know what will happen with that yet, but we’ve just got to give it everything we can as professional footballers in the final four games.
“It hasn’t been easy to watch for the fans this year. I’ve watched my fair share myself whether it was through being injured or not playing, so I know there will be a lot of frustration, upset and anger towards how it’s turned out.
“We’ve got to try and turn next season into another positive. It’s been clear the group this year hasn’t been good enough and we now need to regroup and give the fans something to shout about. We owe it to them as much as each other because of the way they’ve stuck with us.
“Being from the area I know what this means, it hurts, and it’s about restoring some of that pride we had last year so we give them something to get behind.”
