United go into Monday’s game knowing that a win will guarantee League Two football next term, but more importantly manager Paul Simpson wants them to get back to winning ways to bring an end to the worrying run of four games without a victory that has put a dent in what had been an excellent run of form.
“There’s still so much to play for,” he said. “There’s people scrapping for their lives, and to stay in the league, and we have to realise that were still involved in it as well.
“We need to get our own house in order and even if we’re not thinking about relegation, we have to be better than this, it’s as simple as that.
“It will be great if we get what we need, but it would also have been great to do it in front of a fantastic travelling support on Friday, but it didn’t happen.
“Let’s make sure we’re ready for this one. We’ll count heads and see who is available, and we’ll look at whether or not we need to freshen up or change things.
“We don’t have a lot of options at the moment so we’ll see what we can do.”
“I said to the players before we played Walsall that we had an opportunity to totally put any fears to bed,” he added. “To get that we needed to do our jobs properly.
“If that can’t be enough incentive as a footballer to want to do the nitty gritty, basic stuff, we’ve got some problems.
“I said to them after that game, I think they want to do it, they’ve got the desire in them to do it, so bring it out.
“There’s no point being training ground players, you have to do it out on the grass, and that’s how you get in the team and stay in the team.”
And with Mansfield battling at the other end of the table, he commented: “That’ll be tough for us, without a doubt.
“They’re a good side, very fluid in the way they play, and what a great challenge for us. The next chance to make ourselves safe is this.
“We need to be prepared, we need to get recovered and get ready for what will be a good day at Brunton Park.
“What I want is to see us put on a performance for our fantastic supporters again. If we win, we absolutely know we’re safe and that’s the only thing we have to think about and just get out there to do it.”
And with the squad having picked up some injuries and illness, he admitted that it’s down to finding a solution from those who are ready to go.
“We decided to go with a front three on Friday, just to see if we could go and be a bit more positive in getting in behind them,” he explained. “We then had to change it because their holding midfielder got on the ball, so we went with the two fast lads as central strikers, and Denno as a number 10 to get around it.
“We had some half chances, good opportunities, where with a little bit better quality we might have got ourselves in front.
“Maybe when I look back at it - I might be clutching at straws a bit by saying it - but I felt at the time we had some good opportunities.
“In the second half with a back four we were more front-foot. We’ve just got to keep trying to do that, and hopefully if we can do that better against Mansfield we’ll get ourselves a result.”
“We had to change Jon into midfield because we lost Dev and Callum Guy, that’s an area we are really short, simple as that, no hiding from that, we are short of players,” he continued.
“I’ve had to play Gibbo in there at Walsall, to try and get some forward players onto the pitch to be more attack minded.
“We’ve got to try and think of a formula for Mansfield now. It’s not a case of throwing everything out of the window and changing it drastically, because the truth is we can’t, this is the group we’ve got.
“We’ve got to get the right permutation. The right players out there with a bit of freshness and life about them and hope we can go and perform.”
And looking further ahead, he said: “It massively tells you there’s things that need to be changed in what we have.
“It’s not a case of changing everybody, there is some ability in there, but there has to be a change of mentality, some leaders brought into the group.
“The changes made will be to try and improve it as much as we can. It will take time, it won’t happen overnight, and we’ll see whether or not we’re capable of doing it.”
