Boss Chris Hughton has set out the challenge for his Nottingham Forest squad as they look to bounce back from their midweek defeat.
Despite putting in their best performance of the campaign so far, the Reds paid the price for missed chances and fell 1-0 at Swansea City on Wednesday night.
Against a side challenging for promotion, it was nevertheless an encouraging display given Hughton’s men have been battling at the wrong end of the table.
But ahead of tomorrow’s clash with Blackburn Rovers, and as they enter a crunch period of the season, the manager says Forest must aim to get better still, as he vowed there is more to come.
“When you talk about encouragement, that has to be for the whole squad,” he told NottinghamshireLive. “Although it was a team that played in a very good performance - and arguably, in my time here, our best performance - it is still very much a squad performance and a way of playing.
“And you don’t want it to finish there.
“You know you can’t always reach those heights and play as well as that, and it’s about getting results.
“But I’d like to think there are some good combinations - Cafu playing really well and Filip (Krovinovic) has adjusted to how we play very well, Joe Lolley coming in and doing well.
“We hope we can continue to have enough good combinations on the pitch to get the results we get.”
The key area for the Reds to improve on remains finding the back of the net.
It is something they have struggled with for much of the campaign, with just 25 league goals to their name so far this term.
“It has been an issue all season, and it’s not one I mind speaking about because the facts speak for themselves,” Hughton said.
“We are a team that can create chances, and do create chances - as we did at Swansea.
“We restricted them to minimal chances, we had the best opportunities and we still didn’t win the game - that’s the biggest disappointment.
“They are the things that we know and the things we have to continue to work at.
“They are what the facts are, and we can only continue to work as hard as we can to change that.
“We have found it hard. It’s certainly not through lack of trying or trying to be creative with how we play.
“Generally, we’ve created a lot of chances in games.
“If it was the case that we hadn’t, if we were a side that wasn’t creating chances at all, then there’s the answer.
“The only answer at the minute is continue to work as hard as we can and try to solve those problems.”
Hughton feels, however, being able to add Glenn Murray, Krovinovic and James Garner during the January transfer window has helped.
“I think it’s down to good players. If we are talking about recent games, our recruitment in the window has been good,” he commented.
“But we haven’t been a bad side. Even in disappointing periods or games we’ve played, we have had a level of performance which has always been encouraging.
“There are aspects of our game we need to improve, but we have added some more quality to what we already had.
“And these are individuals who have fitted in very well.”
