Instinct can end Mansfield Town goal drought says manager Adam Murray

The lack of goals is becoming a concern following last night’s 2-0 FA Cup replay defeat at Oldham Athletic and Murray is worried his players are letting it get to them.

“We’re in a bit of a drought with the goals at the minute. It’s not just the centre-forwards – it’s from all over the place,” he told mansfieldtown.net.

“We’ve had two or three opportunities where we’ve turned down the shot and we’ve tried that extra pass,” Murray said.

“That’s what happens when you’re not quite getting the goals. You start to over-think things and have that extra touch.

“We’ve got to get back to going off instinct because, again, I thought inbetween the two 18-yard boxes we looked a lot more solid than we have done in certain games.”

Once again last night Stags had the chances to take the initiative in the tie before succumbing to two goals in nine minutes late in the game.

“You can’t miss them chances that we have in the first half and expect to get something out the game,” he said.

“At the minute we’re in one of them patches that you’ve just got to grind through.”

Murray continued: “We know it’ll change if we keep creating the chances and we’ve got to hope that it’s sooner rather than later because we want to stay in that top seven.

“We’ve got to make sure that we keep the confidence high.”

Hartlepool United are Saturday’s visitors, followed quickly by the visit of Exeter City on Tuesday and Murray said: “Our focus now is straight on Hartlepool.

“We started preparing for that yesterday because this week is a massive week for us.

“We want to get back on to home turf and we want to get our league performances and results ‘up there’ because we want to be in that top seven more than anything.

“Like I said before the game, we’ve got some massive games coming up next week so I wanted to come out of the game (at Oldham) with some ‘minutes in people’s legs’.”