Mansfield Town face Cheltenham Town ahead of crucial month for John Dempster

Mansfield Town are back at home this weekend as they face Cheltenham Town at the One Call Stadium, attempting turn their form around.

Mansfield Town have played truly awful in the past few games. Out of two cup competitions in the space of a few days. Beat by Shrewsbury Town 2-0 in the FA Cup Second Round even though Shrewsbury went down to ten men, the amber and blues failed to capitalise on a chance to go through to a big round three tie.

Mansfield then faced Port Vale away in the Leasing.com trophy. The game went to penalties with the Valiants beating the Stags 4-2 on penalties with ex-Stags player Will Atkinson scoring the decisive penalty.

Cheltenham played Port Vale in the FA Cup Second Round and got beat 3-1, but are doing very well in the league as they currently sit fifth with Mansfield Town down all the way down in 15th.

Team news

Captain Krystian Pearce and Danny Rose could be back amongst the matchday squad having been on the sidelines in recent weeks.

Wing-back Kellan Gordon will miss out with a back injury which is expected to see him out of the fray for the next six to eight weeks.

Hayden White and Craig Davies will also not feature although the latter is well on the route towards recovery having trained regularly over the past month. White is expected to return to training at some stage next week.

Joint top scorer Luke Varney is expected to miss out for the visitors, along with Tahvon Campbell, Charlie Raglan and Conor Thomas.

Mansfield Town boss John Dempster delivered his thoughts on a ‘huge’ December for the Stags in Thursday morning’s news conference at The RH Academy.

“We have a massive month ahead of us, a huge month,” he told iFollow Stags. “We don’t want the gap getting any bigger. Looking at the games this month, we need at least eight or nine points, at least.

“The good thing about playing the teams above you is that you can reduce that gap. When you’re not getting the results, even though I’ve been in the business for 20 years, it’s not until you’re in the hotseat that you feel that pressure.”

“They’ve got massive expectation and that’s difficult,” he said. “They’ve probably not had the start that they would have wanted but they’ve still got good players.

“You look at the players that they’ve got – proven at this level and the level above as well.

“It is a difficult place to go. Obviously the fans can go one way or the other. They can get right behind them or we can get on top and they might go the other way.

“We can’t really influence that until we implement what we do. If we don’t do that it could go the other way. We’ve lost the least, we’re in the top seven, considering where we’ve been in the last few years I think we’re in a good place.

“Don’t get me wrong we want to go and win every game but we’re not overthinking anything. We need to concentrate on what we do and not worry about the outside world and outside noise.”

Head-to-head

Mansfield have a good record against Cheltenham, beating them twice and drawing twice. Cheltenham have won once, but it could be Mansfield’s bad run of form that hands Cheltenham their second win against the amber and blues.