ACCRINGTON Stanley boss John Coleman wants his side to sharpen up in front of goal after they failed to find the back of the net for the second successive game.

The Reds followed last week’s goalless draw at Notts County in the FA Cup with a 1-0 defeat to Carlisle in League Two.

MORE TOP STORIES:

Before last weekend Stanley had found the back of the net in their last 14 games, and a run of five wins and a draw in Coleman’s eight league games in charge had moved them into the play-off picture, But Coleman conceded his side were outplayed in Cumbria as they dropped to 15th in the table.

“I’d feared for us this week,” said the Reds boss, “sometimes as a manager you just smell it and I’ve smelt all week to be honest. They were better than us in every department.

“We’re better than that, that’s two games now where we haven’t really troubled their keeper, we’ve had one chance at the end with Sean’s header and maybe Shay should do better in the first half but we haven’t created enough opportunities against a team whose been leaking goals for fun, so that’s testament to how well they did defensively.

“We’ve got to better at attacking, the whole crux of our game is based on attacking. You’ve got two prime examples, Asamoah for them and Shay McCartan for us, both as good as one and another, one had a massive affect on the game and the other didn’t.

"They’ve both had probably as much of the ball in the first half but one gave it away every time he got it and the other was a threat every time he got it.

“I know Shay’s capable of being as good as Asamoah but on Saturday he wasn’t. I’m not blaming Shay for the defeat but that’s just a typical example of how the game went.”

Stanley are back in action tomorrow night as County travel to the Store First Stadium for the FA Cup replay, and Coleman said he and Jimmy Bell would consider making changes for that tie.

“The first thing you do as a manager is look closer to home,” he said, “which is yourself, myself and Jimmy, and we have to analyse what we did this week and what hasn’t worked.

“We’ll be very self critical and we’ll take the blame, because obviously what we decided to do this week hasn’t worked and we haven’t prepared them properly, even though we thought we did, so we’ll have to look at our own methods and maybe our selection as well and get it right for Tuesday.

“We’ve worked hard, you can’t level at them for the workrate, it’s just the naivety we showed is alarming. The times we gave the ball away under no real pressure is alarming.

“We have this propensity to wait for the ideal opportunity to shoot, and then when we explore all the avenues that don’t come we have ridiculous shoots over the bar and that’s something we’re going to have to work on in training.

“They were up for the game and we weren’t and that’s disappointing from my perspective, I don’t mind getting beat by a team who I know are better than us, on the day Carlisle were far better than us but I think pound for pound they’re not, so they’ve outfought us and that’s very, very hard to take from my point of view.”