Another player to make his debut on Tuesday night was striker Kristian Dennis, who came off the bench with just over 12 minutes to go to add some experience to what was a young looking side.
“Kristian has the type of experience we’re going to need, without a doubt,” manager Keith Millen said. “We don’t yet know how fit he is, all we can go by is his game time since before he joined us, and there wasn’t a lot of game time.
“He’s experienced to manage a game I would say. He’s got more than what he had in his legs on Tuesday, of course he has. The trouble is when you have midweek games you have to be a little bit careful with what you’re doing on the training pitch.
“You can’t work them hard the day before a game, they could be on after 10 minutes. It’s not ideal. Next week we’ve got a free week and we could get some real work into them. First of all we have to prepare for Saturday’s game.”
“With all of the new players, of course it’s hard to gel straight away,” he continued. “You’ve got five key first-team players missing as well and any team would miss that.
“On top of that you’re trying to integrate new players that aren’t match fit. That’s not an easy situation. To add on top of that the poor run of form we’re on, they’re all things I have to try and deal with.
“It will be my job now to make sure we put a team out that’s really going to fight for the shirt. I think if the fans see that, they’ll be with us.
“Because it’s not going to be solved on Saturday, we’ve got 17 games left, lots of points to play for, we have to stay calm, but there’s a realisation you can’t ignore four defeats, things have to change. And I think it’s more their mentality than their ability.
“But I’m confident we can turn it round, no doubt. When I first came in we were in a really bad position, the confidence of the dressing room was really low. We’ve turned it round before.
“It’s a new group of players. We’ve lost some to injuries but there’s enough in the dressing room. I’ve got to give them a stronger foundation that they can get a bit more belief in what they’re doing.”
