Carlisle United boss Paul Simpson has been talking about the mental side of dealing with a dip in form.
He has seen his Blues team go four games without a win or a goal, yet they remain very much in promotion contention lying fourth in League Two.
He told the club website: “We are in a little bit of a situation and we don’t have many who have been here before, or who have been through this kind of thing.
“It doesn’t matter whether I’ve been through it, or anybody else, it’s down to individuals to be able to deal with the mental side of what goes with this.
“If it is a mental side then they’ve got to be strong enough to come through it. To achieve anything you have to get through this type of little blip that we’re on. It’s a real unfortunate timing, but we’ve got to stick together and go again.
“You’ve got to do everything you can. We had a go at the end of the game on Saturday but it has to be done from the start. This was a great opportunity against a team that’s done fantastically well this season, and they’re getting nervous.
“You could sense it, and I felt as though it was there for us. We haven’t taken advantage of that and that’s because we didn’t find the quality we needed when we got into good areas.
“So many things weren’t executed properly and that’s really disappointing and frustrating from a group of players who are better than that.
“It’s one game less now, we’re down to seven, and we still have enough games to go where we can affect it by our own results. We have to start very quickly before we do run out of games.”
The next opportunity is the home game against Tranmere on Good Friday, with a bumper home crowd targeted.
Simpson said: “I’ve got no doubt the supporters are going to come out in their numbers and no doubt they’ll come and back us.
“We’ve got to respond in the right way, we’ve got to be able to deal with the situation we’re in at the moment.
“It’s fair to say we haven’t dealt with it as well as we would like recently but we’ve still got seven opportunities to do something about it.
“We face Tranmere on Friday and it’s a huge opportunity because it’s the next one. We do that one properly then we can get ourselves prepared for the next. We’ve got to tick them off one by one.
“We have to get back on it at home in front of our own supporters. We’ve got to get back on the bike again and make sure we do it really well. If we can get a result in that one it sets us up for the Monday game.
“We’ve asked for everybody to stick together, that’s everybody inside and outside the club. This is another opportunity to show our solidarity. Show we are all in it together. And then hopefully we get a performance and result that goes with that.
“There’s loads of points to play for. We are still in a really good opportunity with teams coming to play us, and we can affect them, affect our own position, that’s all we’ve got to do.
“I’ve said it all along, we do our job properly, the rest will take care of itself. We’ve got seven games where we have to do our job properly.”
