Evans left facing facts after ​Sleaford are hit for six by United

​The Greens fell behind after two minutes and never recovered, being 4-0 down at half-time before two further goals compounded their misery.

And Evans felt the difference in quality was evident in every sense.

He told the club’s media channels: “It's not a great situation to be in. The fact is that all 16 of their squad would have started for us, the strength that came off their bench is frightening, while in our dressing room we’ve got five or six lads who have been told they’re not good enough to be here.

"So there’s a gulf in class in that sense, but we said it was going to be a tough month, this was always going to be a tough fixture against a side whose title race is over if they don’t win today, so they were bang up for it and we just didn’t want to disgrace ourselves.

"Unfortunately that scoreline’s not really where we want to be. We’ve made our own problems by giving the ball away in stupid areas, but the way Lincoln move the ball from back to front at 100mph, we haven’t reacted well to it.

"You never want to concede early on but when it’s against a team who are riding high it just bred confidence into them and we’d made big problem for ourselves that there was no coming back from, and unfortunately that then led to more mistakes which made it feel we were licking our wounds and feeling sorry for ourselves at times.

"It’s a mindset thing. We finished the game with the oldest player in our group being 23-years-old, so we’re very young and naive and need to mature and grow.

"There was a spell at 3-0 down where we played some really good football so that was good and I’ve told the players to hang on to that, then in the second-half there were some lovely bits of play that give us hope that there’s something there we can build on, but it will take time to get to where we want to be because we’re such a young side.”

Sleaford visit 11th-placed Ashby Ivanhoe on Saturday.