Darlington suffered a demoralising defeat on Saturday, but they cannot afford to feel sorry for themselves.

That’s the message from winger Nathan Mulligan ahead of this evening’s home game with Notts County.

Mulligan says Quakers should be encouraged by their display in the 3-2 home defeat to Chesterfield, when a late collapse saw Darlington’s twogoal lead wiped out in the last ten minutes.

He teed up Quakers’ first goal in the Stockton-born winger’s most impressive outing for the club.

“I feel as though I had one my best games and I contributed to the first goal which I was very happy but I’d swap that any day for a win. It doesn’t mean anything now,”

said Mulligan, replaced by Dan Groves on 79 minutes with the game seemingly in the bag.

“We were 2-0 up and cruising really. I came off and hadn’t realised what happened so the lads came in the changing room absolutely distraught.

“Everybody had their heads down after the game but we’ve got to pick ourselves up because we’ve got a massive game on Tuesday.”

Quakers lost 4-0 at Meadow Lane in December with three of the goals coming in the first quarter of an hour, and Mulligan added: “For 15 minutes away to Notts County we just fell apart, but other than that we were a good team considering they were right near the top of the table.

“We’ve just got to keep going, pick our heads back up and turn this around. We’ve got some games to come against teams around us and we will take points off them if we play like Saturday.”

Manager Steve Staunton made three changes to his side at the weekend and is likely to stick with the same XI.

Following the previous weekend’s defeat at Morecambe, Alan White, Jeff Smith and Curtis Main dropped to the bench.

Richie Byrne, Josh Gray and Mor Diop were handed starts and Staunton explained: “I just felt we needed to freshen things up a bit and I knew Josh would cause problems with his pace and trickery.

“I thought he had an excellent game. He’s a young boy that needs to kick on.

“I’ve had a word with Curtis.

He was nowhere near good enough last week and we can’t have that.”

Former Darlington midfielder Ricky Ravenhill is in the Magpies side tonight but he could be about to witness the same financial troubles that ended to his time with Quakers last summer.

A Notts County official has admitted the prospects of falling into administration are “50-50” after an audit of its accounts revealed their known debts stand at £6m.

Staunton, however, is not interested in the Magpies’ troubles and he said: “I don’t care about any other clubs’ problems, we’ve got enough of our own.

“We know the position we’re in and we have to soldier on. Saturday was a bitter pill to swallow but we’ll bounce back.”

DARLINGTON (probable): Redmond, Madden, Miller, Byrne, Giddings, Mulligan, Dempsey, Waite, Gray, Purcell, Diop.