Josh Earl days ‘the pressure is off’ as Barnsley travel to Bolton Wanderers on Tuesday still believing they can reach Wembley.
The Reds lost 3-1 at home on Friday in the first leg of the League One play-off semi-final and now visit Bolton on Tuesday at 8pm.
Defender Earl told the Chronicle: “They beat us by two goals. Who is to say we can’t beat them by two goals on Tuesday? We just have to rest and recover, train on Sunday, put work in and figure out how we’re going to do it.
“The pressure is off us in a sense. We can thrive off that. As soon as you get one back, you never know what can happen.
"We know we can score two goals, no problems.”
The third goal in injury-time when straight in from a corner.
Earl said: “It was poor defending from everyone involved. We can’t keep giving away goals like that. It looked like a foul on Robbo (goalkeeper Liam Roberts) but it’s a rubbish goal.
“All three were quite poor. It was a good bit of play for the first goal but we’re down to ten men and should have just stuck together as a team. It’s mistakes we make in the split seconds. You can’t do that in high level matches like this.
“We can be encouraged by the whole performance apart from the three goals. “We played well, went long when we had to, fought for first and second balls, defended really well for most of the game and played good football towards the end.”
The Reds are winless in seven and have only won twice in 13. Earl said: “They haven’t been the results we wanted and we know we haven’t performed unbelievably. Unfortunately that’s just football at times. Everyone has made mistakes that have led to goals. We’ve been unfortunate as well. Sometimes football just doesn’t go your way and a lot of the goals have been unlucky.”
The Reds sacked Neill Collins with one league game left, and Martin Devaney took over.
“It’s not affected us. At the time it was a bit of a shock but it’s our job to go out and play football.”
