Ollie Clarke is hoping that Swindon Town use their 4-0 battering by Walsall as a catalyst to get the squad to raise their standards.

In their first home game of the season, Swindon were comfortably beaten on home turf by Walsall in a game that they never looked remotely likely to get anything from.

Speaking after the game, Clarke discussed the response he hoped to see from the squad as they move towards their next game at Crewe Alexandra this weekend.

 

 

He said: “As a group, we are a fairly experienced group, you talk about it within the changing room and have those discussions and we need buy-in from everyone.

“The manager is going to have his way of playing and coaching and everyone is trying to pick it up as soon as they can.

“You can’t let that affect you, a negative result, you need to go back in on Monday morning with a smile on your face and make sure you are ready to go again.

“We haven’t given a good account of ourselves today and we need to now go and show everyone else that we are capable of producing a good performance, scoring goals, and keeping them out of the net.

“We are disappointed, obviously, but we can be positive that this has come early in the season and we can build from that and hopefully progress as a group quicker.”

Despite the disappointing result and performance, Clarke said that it was also important not to get too carried away and to remember it is about making sure that they take the lessons and get better.

He said: “That one is gone now and we have to think about how we can learn from that and move forward.

“It is not about being the best team in the division at this stage, we have got to try and progress each week so that come the end of the season we are giving ourselves a chance to play for something.

“I think we will take a lot of learning experiences from that today, we know what we have got to do to improve and hopefully that will be very soon.

“We are still in that process of figuring out the different styles of play, when to go direct and when to try and be brace and that is something we can only improve on the more we do in training.”