Linnets boss after a reaction

Linnets boss Adam Lakeland will be looking for an instant reaction from his players when they travel to Banbury in the National League North tomorrow.After enjoying their first gasp of air above the relegation places in the last fortnight, Lynn are hovering just about the drop zone after Scarborough Athletic pulled off an improbable win from the jaws of defeat on Easter Monday.”I want a reaction,” said a furious Lakeland after the 4-3 reverse.”I think I stood here a couple of games ago and I was asked about next season and I said because of what we’d done in the last three or four months we might not have to do much next year.”I’ve now got one or two question marks back in my mind and the players need to know that. I’ve come here to try to keep the club up, which I’m still confident I will, but we were 45 minutes away from being nearly home and dry there and we’ve let that slip. “That’s just our fault and we can’t blame anybody but ourselves for that.”We’ve got another massive game now on Saturday at Banbury, another team that is scrapping for the points, and I don’t want to be managing this team in a relegation scrap next year. “I want to be managing this team competing at the opposite end of the division and we’re not going to do that if we’ve got that half of football in us now and again.”If we’d have come out today. Had we just been second best for 90 minutes and had a bad day through being a little bit jaded, sometimes you can get that. “But we were at it in the first half. The mentality we’ve allowed that to creep in second-half is not something that I want to be associated with.”Lakeland is likely to have demanded answers from his squad after Monday’s second-half horror show. “We always watch the games back anyway, so we won’t do anything too different, he said.”But we need to review and discuss that second half and understand why it happened because I don’t want a repeat of that. “Their position is a lot bleaker than ours and they’re the home side so I’d probably say there’s more pressure on them, but we have pressure on us every single game.”As a full-time team in this league, you have a target on your back and the target’s been even bigger because we’ve been at the bottom of the league. “We’ve worked hard to get ourselves into the position that we’re in and we were outstanding in the first half and we’ve allowed that second half to creep upon us and now it makes the game on Saturday even bigger.” Lakeland can accept losing from time to time, but it was the manner of Monday’s second-half performance that left the Lynn boss seething.”I feel let down, right now I’m angry and I feel let down after that second-half performance,” he said.”I’ve stood here so many times and your job as a manager is you take the brunt. There’s been times where we’ve been poor and I stand here and take it.”I think there have been times where I’ve stood here when the team’s been poor with players in that are no longer at the club, who I didn’t fancy, and I’ve still stood here and taken the brunt.”That’s the responsibility you take as a manager and like I said we’ve been doing brilliantly and they are good lads, but they’ve let themselves, myself and the supporters down in that second half.”If any of them don’t like that then they’ve got to deal with it because it’s the truth.”You can’t have plaudits all the time, and they’ve had loads of that because they’ve been brilliant, but if you put in a performance like that, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth in life.”I’m sure they’ll be hurting as much as I am, and hopefully they’ll put some of that frustration and hurt into the way that they play on Saturday.”I don’t like losing. I can accept getting beat if I think my team’s put everything in and done everything that’s been asked and the information that we’ve been given.”But when they go completely off script and just lose all discipline, organisation concentration, an urgency to get up to the ball and make the opposition make mistakes it hurts even more, certainly when you’re 3-0 up and you lose, that hurts.”