Clemence said: “We are going to have to win every game and what I knew [before Monday] was that if we went there and won we would still be in the top seven with four games to go.

“I think the players would have taken that at the start of the season had you asked.

“We haven’t been able to do it and that is three or four times now in the last five or six weeks where we’ve been seventh and we haven’t backed it up with a victory. We haven’t even got a point.

“Three or four times we’ve been seventh and had to go somewhere to get a result and we haven’t managed to do it on any occasion and that tells me a lot.”

It was comfortably the worst 45 minutes for Clemence since taking on the head coach role.

“It was very tough,” he said. “Momentum is a key thing in football, it always has been, the momentum was all with Harrogate [in the second half] and it was very hard to stop that flow.

“You hope the boys can weather it, and if you get beat, you don’t get beaten by five, you don’t go under like that.”

Clemence had recently switched from a safety-first 3-5-2 formation to a more expansive 4-3-2-1 and his team looked more attack-minded. On Monday it all went wrong, leaving him questioning which way to go.

He said: “We tried to go to a back four to try and be more on the front foot, but when you go to a back four it does expose other areas of our play, so that is something we have to look at.

“I don’t think anyone can knock on my door, can they, if I make changes.”