March Town assistant Seb Hayes reacts to Wellingborough Town defeat ahead of Long Buckby and Coventry Sphinx fixtures

March Town assistant boss Seb Hayes has urged his side to “pull the finger out” to make sure their season doesn’t end with a whimper.

The Hares go into a United Counties League Premier Division South clash against Long Buckby tonight (Tuesday) looking to bounce back from a 3-1 reversal against Wellingborough Town on Saturday.

Hayes issued a rallying cry of “we’ve got to win” ahead of that fixture, having been left disappointed by portions of the side’s performance in the absence of manager Ashley Taylor.

And after that, the Fenland side will gear up for a tough clash against second-placed Coventry Sphinx this Saturday - before another league trip to Newport Pagnell Town next Tuesday.

“Tuesday we’ve got to win,” Hayes said before the Long Buckby game.

“It doesn’t matter how we win - we cannot be complacent going into that game because Bucky are bottom of the league.

“There’s still loads for us to play for. We’re in a cup semi-final and have a good chance of winning that and getting to a League Cup final and winning silverware for this club.

“But if we perform like we did in the last 30 minutes (against Wellingborough) it’s not going to be a good end to the season.

“We’ve got to pull our finger out and start getting the fans excited about something.”

The Hares conceded first in their game at the weekend, and let in another as half-time approached.

Striker Craig Gillies managed to pull one back after the break, and after their third-placed opponents regained their two-goal advantage he had another opportunity to get his side back into things - but missed from the penalty spot.

However, his overall performance was praised by Hayes - who took some positives from the showing, and has urged his side to give their fanbase something to cheer about in the coming week.

“I thought up until the first goal, we were just getting into the game and edging it,” the assistant boss said.

“Then it was poor from us, and when we’re making mistakes at the minute we’re getting punished.

“I’m thinking ‘right, we’ve got something to play with here’, and then that (second) goal has absolutely killed us. We’ve not dealt with that.

“We tried to add energy to the performance from the boys, but I think we felt sorry for ourselves towards the end there and we’ve not reacted or caused any problems in the last 30 minutes to get us back into the game.

“We were in it for that first 50, 55 minutes. We’ve not defended brilliantly as a team, but we were creating chances and we were playing the better football.

“So overall, when Craig had the ball in that first hour he played well. We got a bit of a break with the goalkeeper error, but Craig was there like we asked him to be to slot it in.

“It’s just unfortunate that we’ve not built from there and pushed on.

“The last two, three home games we’ve let them (the fans) down. We’ve got to do better than that.

“We’re fully aware of the support we’ve got - we speak about how when we’re walking in there, we want to give them something to clap about.

“Today we haven’t given anything to clap about. I’ll take responsibility for that with Ash not being here, but it’s got to improve.

“We’ve had that run of home games, and that was an area we really looked at using our crowd to push us on and get results and we’ve not used them to our advantage.”

March vs Wellingborough: Congreve, Knowles, Saunders, Brumby, Emmington, Murphy, Green, McQuaid, Friend, Gillies, Burrows (Subs: Romanos, Vaz, Edwards, Pledger)