Having seen a six-game undefeated run in the league ended with consecutive losses, Stevenage boss Teddy Sheringham has challenged his squad to start another unbeaten streak starting on Saturday against Leyton Orient.

Being beaten by Crawley Town and Dagenham & Redbridge in the three days after Christmas put a dampener on the festive cheer around the Lamex Stadium.

Sheringham told the Comet: “When you’re on a nice run you want to keep it going and the optimism is definitely there.

“When you’re winning games and enjoying football you can’t see anything [negative] happening, you can’t see yourself losing games, so [when you do] it is a big jolt to your system and to the whole group. It was very disappointing.

“We wanted to bounce back straight away and get a result in our home game against Dagenham, but didn’t take our chances early on again and got caught with sucker punches very quickly and it knocked the stuffing out of us.

“We are back to square one again and have to start another little run.”

In Sheringham’s third league game in charge of Boro, his side were undone by three late goals in a midweek trip to Brisbane Road back in August.

This weekend he again takes on the side managed by Ian Hendon, a man Sheringham has played with at Tottenham Hotspur and coached alongside at West Ham United, and he is looking to put one over his counterpart.

“We know we had a very good game with them earlier in the season,” said Sheringham.

“We lost the game 3-0, but for 75 minutes it was an even game and it could have gone either way if we had taken one of our chances again early on.

“They were probably very pleased with their 3-0 win at home and it’s something we have to put right.

“We don’t want teams doing doubles over us so we have got a home game, a fixture against someone that I know about, we’ve played them already so there shouldn’t be any surprises.

“There’s certain things that we’ve analysed about our team and the way Orient might be playing on Saturday.

“We’ve talked about those things as staff, we can’t do a lot with the players after playing Saturday, Monday, but we will be over the next couple of days so we’ll make it all fresh in their minds and make sure that we all know what we are meant to be doing on Saturday.”