Unacceptable. Totally and utterly unacceptable, writes blogger Mark Jones.

The home defeat to Bournemouth was every bit as demoralising as the one to Oldham almost 7 months ago.

Yes, the southerners have been on a roll lately and are fighting for their lives.

Yes, our thin squad is down to the bare bones. Yes, we haven’t had too much go our way just lately. Even so, we can and should be doing better.

I don’t mind losing to superior teams (as opposed to teams that we make look good) and

I don’t mind losing if we give everything. 

But there just seemed to be an acceptance that we were going to be second best on Saturday and I’m afraid that is not good enough. It’s almost as if we are trying to finish the season how we started it. 

We went into March firmly established as play-off contenders. In the six home games since, the opposition have scored first in five of them. (The exception being Brighton and we ended up losing that one.) 

This would be worrying enough but when your second top scorer is on five goals, you don’t need to be a genius to work out that you’ll struggle to pick up points.

Our home record is shocking. Fifteen out of twenty-two teams have taken something away from the Banks’s this season and if you analyse the paltry seven wins it actually looks worse.

The victories over Huddersfield and Millwall were good enough performances but in both cases the opposition were dreadful on the day. 

There’s been routine home wins over Cheltenham, Gillingham and Yeovil who played for 90 minutes with a midget in goal. 

We worked hard for a well-deserved win over Tranmere a couple of weeks back but it was 10 v 11 for almost an hour. 

Forest was a fine win but even then they had chances and the difference between the sides was the quality finishing of temporary signing Ricketts.

Predictably our best home performance of the season was one we didn’t win, against Leeds.    

There has been progress this season for sure. We know that some of our youngsters will continue to improve and I’d certainly have settled for spending the bulk of the season in the top half if it had been on offer last August.

However you have to look to the future and next season will be tough. Three out of Carlisle, Doncaster, Forest, Southend and Leeds will miss out in the Play-Offs. 

It looks like at least one ‘name’ club will be slumming it in League One and no doubt moneybags Peterborough and the MK Scabs will fancy their chances of buying success. Plus all the usual suspects (Tranmere, Oldham, Brighton, Huddersfield et al) will probably be knocking around the top half of the table.

Dicky has already spoke of a rebuilding job and is clearly trying to succeed where many have failed in persuading Jeff to prize the padlock off the piggy bank. 

By my reckoning we need at least three experienced players just to have a chance of maintaining a place in the top half. This division can be an absolute nightmare to get out of (Ray Graydon just made it look easy), those of us who remember the 80s will vouch for that. 

The final challenge of the season for the manager is to sufficiently motivate the boys for the last two games and give us something to hang on to over the summer.

At least it won’t be hard to top Saturday’s debacle.

(Footnote: The bulk of this blog was written after I got home on Saturday night. 48 hours later and I’ve barely changed a word. And it’s good to know DD feels the same.) 

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