FURIOUS Shots boss Danny Searle has spoken of his deep embarrassment after Aldershot Town’s 6-1 capitulation at Dagenham & Redbridge on Saturday.

And he questioned the mentality of his players at the Chigwell Construction Stadium in the wake of the drubbing – a demoralising defeat which prompted him to drag his players back onto the pitch at the end to say sorry to the travelling fans.

“I’m still massively disappointed and upset,” said Searle. “I felt humiliated on Saturday and the thing I have taken out of the game is that I never want to feel like that again. It was embarrassing.

“It was one of the reasons I dragged them back out of the changing rooms to go out and apologise to the fans because you have to take the consequences of those kind of actions. We’ve got some massive points to prove now.”

Searle and his stunned players had a heated exchange with a section of the travelling faithful, but the Shots boss said he wouldn’t shy away from such criticism.

“We got a relative amount of abuse, and rightly so, and I don’t think we could argue with what was being said. I’ve always said people are entitled to their opinions,” he said.

“Some fans were fairly aggressive, but it’s an emotional sport and we’re not going to hold any grudges over that, and some fans were very, very good.

“We spent a lot of time dealing with the negative comments and some of our fans, in fact quite a lot of them, the support they give us is tremendous and they were telling us things like ‘come on, these things happen’, ‘go again’, ‘pick yourselves up’, ‘keep working hard’ and I have the utmost respect for that because it would have been easy to stand there and simply hurl abuse at the players.

“The general message was that they want to see some passion, they want to see some desire and they want to see some determination. They are all words that get spoken in the dressing room a lot and we didn’t show any of that on Saturday, and they have got to reward those fans who showed a bit of faith in them and show them that on Saturday when we play Notts County.”

Despite sending tapes of the game to the players to watch at home on Sunday and then reviewing the demolition again at training on Monday, shellshocked Searle was still largely at a loss as to what happened at Dagenham, who won for the first time in four games.

“In the dressing room after the game on Saturday the players looked lost. It’s the first time that I’ve looked at them this season and mentally thought that every single one of the players on the pitch just collapsed,” he said.

“Having watched the game back again, not in a million years did I think that something like that would happen.

“Three good performances end up being eradicated by one horrendous one, but that’s football and they (the players) have to take that on the chin.

“The fans are going to get a reaction (against Notts County on Saturday). We can’t make guarantees that we are definitely going to win because I would be an idiot to do that, but what they will see is a reaction because there has to be one, the players have to take some responsibility.”