Udoka Godwin-Malife said that Swindon Town’s fixture break would need to be a time of introspection for the players to rediscover their form.

International call-ups for Walsall mean that Swindon will have had 13 days to prepare by the time they take on Notts County on Good Friday.

Three straight defeats is the latest poor run of form from Town in a season on course to be the club’s worst-ever in the Football League and Godwin-Malife said that he felt that the players would need to demonstrate the right mindset to overcome their tailspin.

He said: “I think that you find a true reflection of yourself, and you find yourself as a person when things aren’t going right.

“I have been in successful teams that have gone on to do successful things like get promoted and we still had rough patches when we went three or four games without winning, but we never dropped our heads and we had to keep fighting because nobody is going to feel sorry for you.

“What we understand is that people want to see us fail, the only people that don’t want to see us fail are the people within the club and the fans.

“Outsiders aren’t going to care about how we feel, so we can’t feel sorry for ourselves because nobody else is going to feel sorry for us.

“It is a tight-knit group, we have a good group, and the bones are still there, even the new players coming in are good lads and very good players.

“But that is life, things don’t go your way all the time and that is when you find out about yourself if things aren’t going well.

“Can you turn up? Who is stepping up? We just need more people to step up, me included, I have got to step up and we have got to step up.”

The 23-year-old added that Swindon had demonstrated during those opening nine games of the season what they are capable of and they needed to find that again.

He said: “You don’t become a bad player overnight and we have only lost two players who were key to the success at the start of the season.

“But, if I am correct, it is an 11-a-side game, so we still have the other nine players out there who also contributed to it.

“It has just not been clicking and we just need to start clicking and quick.”