Skegness boss won't accept complacency in final games

Chris Rawlinson says he won’t accept his Skegness Town players ‘going through the motions’ as the Lilywhites’ season comes to a close.

Skegness have three games left to play, beginning this weekend with a home game against Kimberley Miners Welfare who are fighting for their lives at the bottom.

Rawlinson’s side have little to play for other than pride and position, but were beaten 5-1 at Gresley Rovers last weekend, leaving the manager to enforce that he won’t accept any complacency.

He said: “It was a tough week as we’d had a good win against Belper and then put in a dogged display at Shirebrook on an awful pitch, and where we started to run out of players due to injuries in the game and illness setting in afterwards.

"But I was still comfortable with the eleven we had out at Gresley even if we were a bit light on the bench, but that happens to every team at some point so we had to deal with it.

"So I was fine with the side we put out, especially as we then went 1-0 up, but sometimes you have bad days at the office and we looked like a mid-table team that’s safe and with nothing to play for, whereas Gresley are fighting at the bottom, have a new manager and were unbeaten in a couple of games.

"They looked like they had everything to play for and we didn’t, but I’m not going to accept that between now and the end of the season in terms of just going through the motions.

"Playing for Skegness Town means much more than that, just as it does for me managing the team and all the people behind the scenes and volunteers on match day.

"Before Saturday we had the third best defensive record in the league and bad days happen and we just made individual errors and then didn’t really help ourselves by covering for those errors and goals went in.

"After we’d scored early, they scored two in two minutes in the first-half and two in five minutes in the second-half, but the rest of the game was relatively easy in terms of both sides creating chances.

"I’m not going to go massively over the top as we are normally very good defensively, but it’ll be made clear to the players that we are not going to go out with a whimper over the last three games against sides who have all got something to play for.”