Mark Yates: ‘That was as poor as I can remember’

A goal either side of half-time and the sending-off of topscorer Gwion Edwards preceded two more second half goals as they suffered their worst result of the season so far.

“All the credit that the players have gained with me over the first five or six games has been levelled now.

“That was as poor as I can remember. That was as poor as I ever want to see my team play.

“We gave the ball away continuously. We had a couple of good opportunities first half, perhaps didn’t take them.

“They’ve bombarded us with relentless pressure which eventually paid off for them.

“We knew they were going to start first and we wanted to start off even better, it just didn’t happen from the kick-off when we gave the ball away.

“The kick-off summed it up today (bursting forward for a chance on goal after 50 seconds).

“Our desire levels unfortunately just weren’t there today.”

Yates refused to blame Crawley’s two-week break in competitive games caused by international appearances.

“There’re no point making excuses, we were just poor on the day, really poor.

“The supporters don’t want to hear me saying that regularly and I don’t want to be saying that too regularly.

“There’s not many players which emerged from that today with their reputation enhanced in the area of Mansfield today. Freddie (Woodman) made a couple of saves, Simon Walton to an extent. I can’t think of too many others.

“We knew it was going to be work in progress. I hope we didn’t turn up thinking we were going to produce because we’ve been on a three-game unbeaten run. Three wins on the spin.

“I’ve asked them how did we go from keeping three clean sheets on the spin to looking like we could concede at any time during the second half?

“We’ve got to learn how to deal with adversity better, we’ve got to learn how to stick together.

“It was hopefully just a bad day at the office and we’ll get back to the training ground on Monday and realise we’ve got to be a damn sight better than that today.”

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