The Whites again failed to make it-back-to-back wins to give their push renewed fuel as they fell 2-1 at the Stags to slide back to 10th spot in the League One rankings.
And Evatt was sad to have to deal with a fourth away defeat of the campaign after Aaron Collins’ 12th goal of the season just before half-time appeared as like it may give the framework for a successful fightback.
After his team gave Mansfield a two-goal lead after 36 minutes on New Year’s Day, the Wanderers manager declared, “I felt like we would win the game, I genuinely did, when we got that goal back.”
“I thought we would take over, and we did. Aside from the two moments in the first half that lasted five minutes, we dominated the game.” But we were disappointed by our last-third performance.
The majority of the games we’ve lost this season were ones we deserved to lose, which is frustrating. We weren’t worthy of losing that today. The performance was good for the most part. We simply let ourselves down by giving up two pretty poor goals, suffering two severe penalties, and playing poorly offensively, especially in the last third.
Both before and after Mansfield took advantage of two defensive errors to secure the points through goals from Stephen McLaughlin and Lee Gregory, Wanderers had chances to score.
The only goal they managed to score, though, came from Collins’ effort. Wanderers will now go to Exeter City on Saturday in an attempt to get to the season’s halfway point, where they still have ground to make up on the top six.
Evatt, whose team had finished 2024 on a high note against Lincoln City, remarked, “We had so much good play to get us to the final third and then our final-third execution, delivery, pass, decision was just completely wrong.” Evatt’s team was unable to support that performance in the first of eight games in January.
“We scored the one time we managed to get everything together. This one is particularly annoying since we had so many chances, so much control, and so much domination in an away game.
“We didn’t to do ourselves any favours today with the scoreboard pressure. Conceding two goals applies that pressure.
You know you’ve got to get back into it which can make you rush your decisions and the fact that we know we need to win games, we know we’re not in the position that we want to be and we have to start winning regularly.
“It’s just a knock-on effect and that creates some panic in the final third when you need composure, some detail and need to understand what we’re trying to do and today we became too rushed at that.
“Most of the performance was pretty good. Moments need to be better and we have been heavily punished in a game which we had full control of. We just have to dust ourselves down and try and respond and go again.”
