Stevenage manager says there is still time for his side to pull away from a battle at the bottom of League 1

Gary Smith says he would be ‘deeply disappointed’ should he get a tap on the shoulder from chairman Phil Wallace before the end of the season to say his time at the club is up.

Boro host Brentford this evening (Tuesday) on the back of six league defeats in succession, but Smith believes that his players can turn their form around and pull clear of a relegation dogfight in their remaining 12 matches.

Speaking about the remainder of the season, Smith said: “Someone once told me when you take the job you’re a day closer to the sack. The point is, [Wallace] has a business and it’s my job to get as much as I can out of the players.

“I truly believe that we’ve got the players. I’m certainly in the right frame of mind for the challenge. It’s not going to be easy, but we’ve got 12 games left and I know at some point that we’ll turn this around.

“The chairman is a very good guy, he’s a good businessman and he understands the game an awful lot.

“It’s his prerogative of course, but I’d be deeply disappointed at this stage [if he called time on Smith’s tenure] for this reason: we’ve made an abundance of changes and yes our form has been poor but the opportunity is still there to give ourselves a wonderful end to the season, to send everybody away in high spirits.

“Then we’ll look back and say the meat of it didn’t go at all well. If it were a storyline it would have been a great opening, a terrific finish, but the meat of the story had let it down and it’s not going to be a bestseller. We’re looking for a good ending, and I believe deeply that we can find it.”