Accrington Stanley's assistant manager speaks to the Lancashire Telegraph.

IT has been a bad week for everyone associated with the club and it has been a difficult time both on and off the field.

We have had the betting investigation hanging over us for the best part of 12 months and I think the timing of the announcement of the charges against players is poor – but that is down to the FA and not us.

It has taken that year to come out and it isn’t a good time for the people allegedly involved or for anyone at Stanley, even though the club has done nothing wrong.

But it doesn’t make good reading.

But out of all of this, the one player I feel sorry for is Peter Cavanagh.

To drag him through this for a £5 accumulator bet seems odd.

It is the sort of bet that thousands of people up and down the country have every week on the football.

I have known Peter for many years and he insists he can’t remember putting the bet on.

I can’t say anything about that, but I do know just how much Peter cares about this football club.

He puts 110 per cent in all of the time and is club captain.

In fact, I feel it is diabolical that Peter can be dragged through this for a £5 bet.

As for the other players, well if they are proven guilty of what they are charged with, then they deserve what happens.

But whatever has gone on, it has been announced at an appalling time and now two of our current players, Peter and Robbie Williams, will be subjected to the taunts of fans before anything has been proven against them and I am not sure the timing is right when there is less than a month of the season left and this has been hanging over people for almost a year.

It wasn’t nice to see it splashed all over the papers. But that is going to happen and will happen until something comes along to take the wrong headlines off us.

It is not good for the players and not good for the club when we are still looking for the extra win that will mean we are safe.

It was disappointing to perform as badly as we did on Saturday against Lincoln – but we were slow out of the blocks and conceded a sloppy early goal.

We haven’t scored enough goals this season to go about giving them away and it was disappointing for everyone concerned.

With the number of games the lads had been playing on Saturdays and Tuesday, they had a bit of a break and that perhaps showed.

We did show a few of our true colours at times in the game - but we know we were not good enough and now we go into two massive games at Grimsby on Saturday and at home to Chester on Monday.

We are under no illusions about how difficult those games will be as both clubs are trying to fight off the threat of the drop into the Conference.

Neither will want to lose to us - and we still need one more result to make sure we are safe and everyone at the club is focused on that.

Ideally, we wanted to be safe before we played these games. We have a good gap on both of them and that was the aim and now we are close to our target.

But we still want to finish the season on a high in the final five matches.

The six-match unbeaten run was great while it lasted but that went when we didn’t perform last weekend.

And now our ai is to go on another little run to finish well – and a couple of decent results will help this week finish better than it started.