Attenborough seeking an individual and collective response from his Steelmen

The Steelmen head to Loughborough Dynamo for a third meeting between the two sides this season on the back of two successive defeats after they suffered a heavy 4-0 home loss to Harborough Town at Steel Park last Saturday.

That left Corby five points adrift of the play-off places in the Northern Premier League Midlands.

But, more importantly, Attenborough was left bitterly disappointed by the manner of the derby-day defeat.

And that’s something he wants rectified on Saturday.

“I could turn around and say there were loads of mitigating factors about last Saturday,” the Corby boss said.

“We had four missing, two playing with illness and Rio (Molyneaux) played at 50 per cent because he’s still not right after dislocating his shoulder against Boldmere.

“But we’re not unique, we run a fairly small squad because you can’t keep 20 players happy so when things pile up on you all at once, it will always weaken you.

“Having said all that, and like I said after the game, it was no excuse because even players who have been playing week in, week out and who were fully fit didn’t turn up.

“I still felt our starting 11 was good enough to get a result but we didn’t perform, we didn’t stick to the game plan and we didn’t do the basics well enough.

“We have to make sure that this weekend, we are better and, if nothing else, we show a lot more grit and desire than we did last week.

“That was the first time this season where I came off and questioned people’s heart and desire.

“I have always said that a lack of quality will happen from time to time at this level of football.

“But what I won’t stand and watch and accept is people going through the motions and allowing teams to beat us comfortably, especially on our own turf.

“I expect a response from the players both individually and collectively.

“We have got two tough away games coming up and the last thing I said to the players on Saturday was that you learn a lot more about the characters you have after you lose a game.

“Everyone can be happy and jumping around when you win but let’s see what we made of in the next couple of weeks.

“We need to try to get ourselves back on track.

“If you look across the season so far, we have been too inconsistent.

“We started really well, we then had a spell of too many draws, we then had a really good spell and now we have hit a couple of bad results.

“So we have got to find a level of consistency if we want to be in and around it.

“We probably need to go back to basics a little bit this weekend and make sure we do the dirty side of the game a hell of a lot better than we did last Saturday.”