DON’T let anyone try and convince you that footballers don’t care – certainly not this current crop of Swindon Town players anyway.

And if anyone needed evidence of this then they should look no further than Scott Cuthbert.

It was a rare off day for the normally-assured centre-back against Walsall, as his error allowed Steve Jones to open the scoring shortly before half-time.

And although Cuthbert played a major part in Charlie Austin’s 55th-minute equaliser to redeem himself for the slip-up, the 22-year-old was hurting at the final whistle and fuming at a dropped two points.

“I don’t like playing bad or getting bad results,” he told the Advertiser.

“It’s not nice, especially when I was part of the mistake. Hopefully if I play next week then I can make up for it.

“I passed it back to Dave (Lucas) and was expecting him to kick it, so I just turned round and should have watched him.

“He’s passed it and I didn’t know the ball was behind me until the last minute. I tried to jump over it and it hit my heel.

“It’s one of those things and there’s nothing I can do now. So I guess all I can do is try and forget about it and move on to the next game. It’s very frustrating though.”

Frustration has been uttered plenty of times over the last week following good performance with minimal reward against Colchester and Exeter. And it was more of the same in this clash with the Saddlers as Swindon seemed to lack some of their mid-season sparkle.

Whether a gruelling season is beginning to take its toll, the players are starting to panic at squeaky bum time, or a combination of both, only manager Danny Wilson can determine.

But this was an ideal opportunity to get back in the driving seat in the second League One automatic promotion spot, and Town passed it up.

Walsall forced five corners inside the first 13 minutes as they proved they hadn’t just come to Wiltshire to defend, and defender Clayton McDonald fired a warning shot with a couple of powerful headers, one of which forced David Lucas into a smart save.

However, the hosts soon began to turn the screw and Saddlers stopper Rene Gilmartin smothered well at the feet of Austin, kept out Danny Ward’s effort and watched a Billy Paynter volley fly over the top.

And then they imploded two minutes before the break. There was no chance of danger when Cuthbert played a simple pass back to Lucas, but as the keeper returned the favour his colleague wasn’t switched on.

The ball struck the centre-back’s heels and bounced into the path of Alex Nicholls, who then played in Jones for a crisp strike into the far corner.

Swindon were shell-shocked but hit back 10 minutes after the restart. Paynter had just seen a close range header saved by Gilmartin, and from the resulting corner, Cuthbert stabbed goalwards through a crowd of players for Austin to turn home almost on the line.

Alan Sheehan went close from distance before Jon-Paul McGovern thought he had scored direct from a free-kick, only to see Gilmartin pull off a top class save to divert the ball away.

And the keeper excelled again from the same player’s first time volley as Walsall failed to clear a corner.

Town were almost made to pay in the 80th minute when captain Gordon Greer was caught in possession and the visitors broke at pace, but Nicholls’ finish was very poor when well placed.

It was a let-off for the home side, and Cuthbert knows only too well they have to cut those errors out if they are to achieve success.

He said: “You’ve got to look at the positives and say it’s a point gained I guess, with Millwall, Leeds and Charlton getting beaten. But it doesn’t feel like it.

“But when teams like Walsall come here we are expected to beat them, and I thought we should have got the three points. It was just another silly mistake which has cost us.”

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