Whilst the pain of being relegated is still very much uppermost in everyone’s mind, Gavin Macpherson insists his players will react as professionally as possible in an attempt to end the season on a positive note.

Town make the long journey to playoff-chasing Weston-Super-Mare tomorrow without the suspended Henry Hawkins, potentially a massive miss but mitigated somewhat by the potential return from injury of Adam Thompson. Jake Cass’ all-too-brief comeback is over, however, through a mixture of injury and business reasons.

“We were always very much eyes wide open when Jake came back and tried to give us some resilience in the forward positions,” explained Gavin. “Obviously now with relegation confirmed it’s right and proper that he does what he has to do. We understand where’s he’s at.”

While our last three games may be redundant and our last two dead rubbers in terms of influencing either end of the table, Town are going all out to upset the apple cart — starting at the home of the Seagulls in Somerset.

“We’ve done exactly what we normally do in terms of preparation and I’ve set the players a task of doing something we haven’t done all season which is to win three games in a row,” said Gavin.

“Looking back we’ve probably drawn too many games but there’s no point in suddenly doing something different. I’m certainly not sending a team out that is going to be happy coming off the pitch with nothing. Maybe the shackles will come off naturally but we will go about our business in the most professional way we can. There’s no last day at school syndrome.”

Gavin revealed he’s had loads of goodwill messages since that fateful day on Easter Monday.

“A lot of people within the game have acknowledged that in their view my job has been very difficult. I’m obviously hugely appreciative of people seeing the efforts we’ve put in but at the end of the day it doesn’t mean that much in the scheme of things.”

AW