Adam Lakeland will demand a response from his King’s Lynn Town players as they look to steady a ship that was hit by a rocket last time out.

The Linnets looked to be cruising towards a 12th game in a row unbeaten before a catastrophic second-half failure against Scarborough that saw them go from 3-0 up at half-time up to 4-3 losers.

Lakeland was furious post-match, labelling it a shambles and saying his players had let him down, even querying whether the 45-minute collapse had made him think twice about his summer rebuilding plans.

The message was loud and clear: there could be no repeat – starting with 22nd-placed Banbury this weekend.

“I want a reaction,” he said. “I want a reaction because I stood here a couple of games ago and I was asked about next season and I said that I felt because of what we've done in the last three, four months that we might not need to do as much next year.

“But I've now got one or two question marks at the back of my mind and the players need to know that. I've come here to try and keep the club up, which I'm still confident we will do, but we were 45 minutes away from being nearly home and dry there, but we've let that slip.”

Results elsewhere didn’t help Lynn – although Banbury were beaten 2-1 at home by Hereford on Wednesday - and, as Lakeland said, put Lynn “right back in the mix again”.

“That's just our own fault,” he said. “We can't blame anybody but ourselves for that. So we'll be in, working hard. there'll be no day off on Wednesday. Will be in and we'll be reviewing that performance.

“And we've got another massive game now on Saturday at Banbury, another team that are scrapping for the points.

“But I don't want to be managing this team in a relegation scrap next year. I want to be managing this team competing at the opposite end of the division and we're not going to do that if we've got that half of football in us every now and again.”

“If we'd have come out and just been second best for 90 minutes and just had a bad day, maybe looked a little bit jaded, then sometimes you can get that. But we were at it first half and with the mentality we've allowed that to creep in second half and that's just not something that I want to be associated with.”