Injuries leave Mansfield boss Nigel Clough cursing after Doncaster draw

Nigel Clough was left scratching his head as he lost four of his Mansfield players to injury during their 2-2 draw at Doncaster.

The Stags twice came from behind to maintain their unbeaten start to the League Two season, with goals from Louis Reed and George Maris cancelling out strikes from Tom Nixon and Joe Ironside.

And Clough felt his side was worthy of taking all three points, despite the injury issues on the night.

“I can’t believe we’ve lost four players to injury,” he said.

“Alfie Kilgour doesn’t look very good – we think he might have snapped his Achilles – and, then, Callum Johnson has got a hamstring strain, Aaron Lewis a calf strain and Hiram Boateng a groin strain.

“We had to move Lucas Akins to right-back from centre-forward which we didn’t want to do, but he was the only option and played more like a right winger than a right back anyway in the second half.

“We should have won with the chances we had, but we couldn’t quite finish them off apart from the two we scored that were excellent in terms of the build-up play too.

“We also got punished quite harshly, as they only really had three shots but two of them have gone in and, whilst I thought Christy (Pym) should have done better when he parried the shot for the second goal, the first was a goal-of-the-season contender.”

Doncaster boss Grant McCann was far from satisfied with the draw despite it getting them off the mark in League Two for the season.

Nixon and Ironside both netted their first goals for the club but McCann was frustrated to have not taken the win on home soil, despite a much improved performance from his side.

He said: “I want to see more fight and determination before we can see the fruits of how we want to play. The basics of football are making sure you work, you run and fight and the bits after that come.

“We’ve drilled that into the players over the last couple of days and hopefully the fans could see that. I’m not happy with a point at home, no matter what stage we’re at or what stage the opposition are.

“It’s a step in the right direction for us in what we’ve shown in the first two league games.

“We showed a lot of grit and determination, particularly reacting off what we saw on Saturday. We needed to show that and we needed a reaction on that side of things anyway because we were up against a Mansfield side that’s been together for five years or so.

“We’re a bit of a work in progress. We need to make sure we get through this walk-before-we-can-run period. I thought we showed a lot of that.”