East Fife manager Gary Naysmith challenged his players to stop giving themselves mountains to climb in games after watching them slump to their 14th league defeat of the campaign.
The Bayview boss cut a frustrated figure on Saturday following his team’s 3-0 loss at Brechin City and bemoaned his team’s tendency of late of giving opponents a head start.
The Fifers have fallen behind in each of their last four league fixtures and have paid the price on three of the occasions, with only a spirited second-half fightback against Forfar on January 25 preventing a clean sweep of defeats.
“You can’t keep giving yourself a deficit to claw back, but that’s what’s happening just now,” Naysmith said.
“When we won against Forfar recently we were behind, against Dunfermline we were behind and we fell behind again against Brechin.
“You’ve got to have that mentality as a team to say: ‘We’re not going to go behind’ and as a player to say: ‘If I’m not having my best game I’ll still give 100% and I’ll make sure my opponent will not have a good game either’.
“I don’t think enough of our players did that against Brechin. I was frustrated because I didn’t think Brechin actually had to work hard to get their victory.
“If you look at shots on goal, I think we’ve probably had more than Brechin, but when you don’t make teams work hard for their goals, you are always going to face an uphill battle, and that’s what happened.
“As a team, we didn’t make them work hard enough for their goals.”
The Fifers are due to head to Stenhousemuir on Saturday, and could close the gap between the teams in the table to just one point with a victory.