MARK Cooper knows hearing fans question his position at the club is par for the course but the Town boss isn’t going to let any such suggestions throw him off the job in hand.

The Robins currently find themselves in the midst of a difficult run, with only one win in their last 11 games, but still sit ninth in the League One table following a largely impressive season built on a significantly reduced budget compared to the frivolous era of Paolo Di Canio.

Such a long gap between victories has led sections of the Town support to question Cooper’s position at the County Ground, but the Town manager is well aware how fickle the management game can be and is determined to carry on doing his job.

“You know it’s the territory for the manager, it’s part of it.,” he said. “When you win you get pats on the back and when you’re losing you get a kick up the backside because that’s the way it is.

“There’s social media and then every time you turn Talksport on or you read a paper, if a manager loses two games then he has to be sacked.

“It never used to be like that and if you go back to when my dad was a manager, managers never got sacked. They finished their contracts or they retired to Spain or did some gardening, but now it seems that if you lose two games everyone wants the manager to be sacked.

“If you sack the manager the new one brings new staff in, brings in even more players and ends up costing the club a lot of money.”

Having already conceded the play-offs may now be beyond his side Cooper is keen to look to next season and believes the final few weeks of this campaign, starting with Bristol City tomorrow, can help shape the future.

“I think at the start of the season it was about staying in the league, and we are now 11 points clear of the team fourth from bottom, and are still ninth,” he said.

“There has been a big transition and turnover of players, with a really young group of players, and I’m not sure where people really expect us to finish because if we win a few games we are up and around the play-offs.

“People can get carried away and we’ve not been brilliant in recent weeks, but we are where we are so if we can finish the season strongly I think we will have a really good season next year with what we’re going to add to the squad.”