Carlisle boss Paul Simpson spoke once again about the need for consistency following the disappointing defeat at Orient on Saturday.
“You have to be consistent over a game, that’s what I keep repeating,” he said. “It’s game to game, it’s 90 minutes, 100 minutes of the game, you have to do it.
“They stuck at it, Orient, even though they were under the cosh for a short spell, they put bodies on the line and we have to do it some more. It’s easy for me to stand here and say it but we have to do something better than we’re doing now.
“It may be that we need a lift, but I’m afraid nobody gives you that lift, no team we’ve come up against is gifting goals like we’re gifting goals. We have to give ourselves a lift and dig deep.
“It has to come from within, I don’t care what you say. We can all talk about tactics and team selections but that desire and drive has to come from within every individual every single day. Unfortunately that’s not what we’re getting and it has to change.”
“There’s a bit of a mental weakness there unfortunately that isn’t brave enough to stay on the game and stay on it,” he added. “We’ve got to look at it and address it and do something about it.
“I spoke first in the dressing room after the game but the players have said a lot to each other which will stay in there. They have to make demands of each other and make huge demands of yourself.
“If you can’t mentally deal with it then it will find you out, and at the moment we’re finding it tough to mentally deal with what’s going on. We have to find a solution as quick as we possibly can.
“We wait for something to go against us before we play, so we’re chasing and the pressure’s off a little bit, then we get back in it and there’s an expectation to keep going, and they don’t deal with that very well.
“They have the ability to be strong mentally, but it has to come out. There’s a bravery. I always think about myself as a player, I wasn’t brave in terms of going and tackling and heading, going crunching into tackles, but I was brave to want to get on the ball.
“When we’re in that sort of position, we’re not brave to get on the ball, and the decision making is a little bit loose. We can’t afford to do that. We’ve got to show a bravery.
“I always have a thing that if you’re going to go down, you go down kicking and screaming, and I think we’ve gone down really pathetically.
“From getting ourselves back into it at 1-1 and looking in a really good shape, I think we’ve taken our foot off it and not been able to go and carry on being as ruthless as we were.”
