‘Have To Be Miles Better’ – Stockport County Boss After Missed Chance To Close Gap On Imps

Stockport County’s midweek collapse at Burton Albion has handed us another little nudge in the automatic promotion race, and their manager did not try to dress it up.

It is only one result, but when the margins are this fine, a 3-0 defeat at this stage of the season is the sort of slip that can reshape a run-in.

Stockport stumble as Burton hit 3-0

We have all had those nights where nothing works, but what matters in a promotion chase is how quickly you put it right, and Stockport now have to do exactly that after a baffling no-show at Burton Albion.

For us, the timing is notable. With Cardiff and the Imps setting the pace at the top, everyone else is scrapping for position, and Stockport were presented with a chance to move up the table and crank up the pressure. Instead, they were blown away, and Dave Challinor sounded genuinely stunned by what he had just watched.

“Over the course of the time I’ve been here I can’t think of any occasion where every facet of the game was off for us but that was the case for us against Burton. Nobody in our whole group came out with any positives whatsoever,” he said.

“It was an opportunity to go third in the table and put pressure on the teams around us but we’ve done none of that. We have to be miles better against Stevenage.”

That is as clear a public dressing-down as you are likely to hear from a manager who has generally had his side well drilled and reliable. The specifics he pointed to will ring familiar to anyone who has watched a team unravel, not tracking runners, not competing, and mistakes creeping into every phase of play. When a manager is listing basics rather than tactics, it tells you the performance level has fallen off a cliff.

Big response needed

The other interesting part of what he said was the insistence that they normally respond well. Last season, he referenced them not losing consecutive games, and while they have done it a couple of times this year, he framed that resilience as something they can still lean on. That makes their next fixture, at home to Stevenage on Saturday, feel like a proper barometer game. If they are flat again, it becomes more than one bad night; it becomes a wobble.

From our point of view, it reinforces the value of simply being us. Keep doing the hard things well, keep turning decent performances into points, and let the pressure sit with the teams trying to chase the pace. Nobody is handing out promotions in February, but this is the part of the season where dropped points start to feel twice as heavy, because you do not get many chances to win them back.

Stockport’s defeat does not change what we need to do, but it does underline a theme that keeps coming back in League One: momentum can disappear in an instant. The sides that go up are usually the ones who limit those moments, and, crucially, are ruthless when rivals offer them an opening.

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