Fleetwood Town loanee aims to put Cheltenham Town defeat behind him

The Cod Army return to Highbury in a match between two sides both in need of three points to pull clear of the League One relegation zone.

Both teams go into the game on the back of defeats, Lincoln having lost to Doncaster Rovers in midweek while Town were beaten by Cheltenham Town last weekend.

That made it six games without a win for Stephen Crainey’s players, leaving them only two points clear of the bottom four with a third of the season remaining.

Johnson made the 30th appearance of his season-long loan from Portsmouth last time out and admitted they weren’t at the races.

The 25-year-old said: “We obviously know as a group that last Saturday wasn’t acceptable, it wasn’t good enough from our part.

“We’ve watched it back and we need a reaction from all of us. Hopefully we can do that on Saturday.

“It was one of those days. We weren’t at it, we weren’t getting the second balls, we weren’t winning the first contacts.

“I thought we looked sluggish. With where we are in the league, with all to play for, a performance like that wasn’t good enough and we need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

“Those games do happen in football, we just need to make sure it was a one-off.

“We can’t afford to have any more games like that with the situation we’re in at the minute, we need to put it behind us.”

Going into the last two-and-a-half months of the season, 10 points separate second-bottom Doncaster from Lincoln in 17th.

Lincoln’s struggles come barely nine months after losing to Blackpool in the play-off final and Johnson expects them to pose a tough test this afternoon.

He added: “They are a good side and they have some good players, some top League One players.

“No game is easy in this league and we’ve found ourselves down at the bottom end.

“It’s very tight but we know that if we win our games, we will be fine, so we can just concentrate on ourselves.

“We know it’s going to be this tight until the end but if we concentrate on ourselves and win games, we will climb the table due to how tight it is.

“It’s all down to us and we know that we can get results if we perform the way we know we can – and have done in the past.

“We just need to make sure we do that consistently and not let performances happen again like what happened last Saturday.”

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