DARLINGTON are desperate to get back on the pitch, says manager Martin Gray, having spent an enforced break working on ways of eradicating the errors which have led to a run of poor results.

Their most recent outing was a week last Tuesday, when they lost in the FA Trophy at Marine, an outcome which created a free Saturday last weekend, while their conquerors lost in the next round at Stockport County.

Darlington busied themselves with an extra training session, while five senior players – Peter Jameson, Gary Brown, Adam Nowakoski, Nathan Cartman and Liam Hardy – played in a reserve game against Redcar Athletic in the Wearside League.

Darlington lost 1-0, a result in keeping with the first-team’s form, which currently stands at six matches without a win ahead of today’s trip to second-placed Kidderminster Harriers.

“It’s been good to have a break but we’re desperate to get back on the pitch,” said Gray, whose fifth-placed team could leapfrog Kidderminster with a win if there is a draw between Chorley and Tamworth, who are third and fourth.

“It’s been a chance to get some work done and go through some stuff. We had a reserve game last week so some lads got some minutes in and that was valuable to them.

“It was a good work-out and can only be of benefit. I wasn’t bothered about the result, it was more about players getting playing time.”

Only once before in Gray’s four and a half years at the helm have Darlington gone so long without a win.

They endured a six-match barren run in September 2014. They ended it with a 2-0 win at Ossett Town, before going on to put nine successive league wins together, conceding only twice.

Preventing the concession of goals, however, has been problematic this season, with nine scored against Quakers in their last four matches alone and opposition teams finding set-pieces to be one of Darlington’s weak points.

“We understand why we haven’t won as many games and picked up as many points of late, it’s because errors have cost us and we’ve got to stop them,” admitted the manager.

“We’ve worked on it, we’ve spoken in small groups and in team meetings.

“We’ve identified the problems and we’ve got to get better. We also need to be more focused on our jobs as individuals.

“At work, if you don’t do your job right then you get told and hopefully you learn. It’s the same with the players. There’s no finger pointing but if we continue to make errors we’ll continue to cause ourselves problems.

“We’ve got to cut out the basic errors. Everyone makes mistakes, nobody does it intentionally, and when it happens we have to be focused on defending the set-piece and getting back to being more disciplined instead of creating unnecessary problems, because we’ve been doing too much of that lately.”

Before the current run Darlington were unbeaten in eight league matches and rose to second in the table, a sequence which started after a 1-0 loss at home to Kidderminster in September.

Gray added: “I have confidence in the players. We had an eight-game run when we didn’t make as many errors, or if we did they were not highlighted.

“Every time we have made an error recently it has been a goal.

“We’re not making a mountain out of a molehill. We’re exactly where we want to be at this stage of the season, we want to challenge and we’ve given ourselves a great chance. There’s lot of positives still.”

Gray made four changes for the match at Marine, but Kevin Burgess, Phil Turnbull, Stephen Thompson and Mark Beck are all due back in the starting XI today, as is Peter Jameson after serving a three-match ban.”