DISAPPOINTING, frustrating – they’re pretty much the first words that spring to mind about Sunday night’s game at Whitley. The printable ones anyway.

We did everything right for 55 minutes and there was only us in the game. It was one of our best road games all season; they couldn’t live with us.

We were 1-0 up at the end of the first period, then 3-0 up by the end of the second.

It was all going well until the last five minutes and then we lost it from there, somehow managing to concede three more goals in the last three minutes.

There was a bit of luck involved with the first one, which ended up in the top corner. But the other three were as a result of us letting them keep chipping away and coming at us and they got their rewards.

We just sat back and maybe we thought we already had the game in the bag.

If that was the case, it shouldn’t have been because it’s happened to us before up there.

It’s a tough place to go because they always keep playing right to the very end and they’ve turned people over in the last minutes of games before.

I don’t think it’s because we thought we’d won it. They scored one goal and momentum instantly changed. We were on the back foot and they were pushing to get something out of the game.

We’ve done it to teams ourselves in the past where we’ve nicked a result in the end, and we need to get back to that. We need to play for 60 minutes, not 55.

But we can’t let our heads drop, we have to take the positives out of the performance, including a debut goal for Jake Nurse.

Our new signing from Manchester Minotaurs was our man of the match as far as I was concerned.

He looked like he had been with us for a while and hopefully he will prove to be a real asset to us in the coming games. Because we can’t really afford to lose again now, given the number of points we’ve dropped in recent months, and teams are picking up points around us.

But in my experience we play better with our backs against the wall. We’ve put a winning streak together before when we’ve needed to and I’m confident we can do it again.

I didn’t think it would be this complicated this season after the success we enjoyed last year.

On paper we’ve probably got the best team in the league. But it doesn’t count for anything on paper. We’ve got to perform in games, and we haven’t done that enough of late.

Once we get a few wins going we will be okay, but time’s running out, so it needs to be soon.