With pre-season now in full swing, Tuesday's game against Horndean was an opportunity to get both minutes and a performance against a side currently playing at step five of the football pyramid.

Yet, Shaun Gale’s side produced a somewhat Jekyll and Hyde performance after taking a 2-1 lead half-time, with goals from Rory Williams and Dan Wooden, before succumbing to a 4-3 defeat.

The Boro’ boss described the second-half as “unacceptable” and was disappointed in the manner in which the team lost.

Speaking after the game, he said: “I’m not going to stand here and criticise people, but the players know that it's unacceptable, for some players the performance was unacceptable in the second half.

“We were in total control in the first half, for the majority of it, and scored a couple of good goals and got off to a good start, but we gave away a soft goal - that was the story of the night for us.

“But take nothing away from Horndean, they are a good side and played some great football, their third goal was a fantastic goal and they deserved it on the night.

"They did the things you need to do in football better than we did tonight.”

Horndean had turned the game on it’s head in the second half and went into a 4-2 lead before Brad Tarbuck pulled one back in the final moments of the match.

The half-time substitutions seemed to affect the Boro’ players who struggled to ever get going after the re-start.

Gale continued: “We made three subs at halftime, two of them in the back line, but we made basic errors and poor mistakes, really poor mistakes.

“But listen, we played them in a pre-season friendly, rather than a league game and we have to make sure we learn from that and we defend much better than that.”

Despite the negative result, there are some positives to be taken away from what was only a pre-season game.

Several players were given a full 90 minutes and at this stage of the summer, fitness and avoiding injury is key, and Gale now believes the squad can focus on fine tuning their shape and performances with a string of tough fixtures lined up before the league campaign kicks off.

He added: “We scored three goals but we conceded four - we need to get that balance right.

“We concentrated hard on keeping people fit, we’ve come in from lockdown and got that right, without picking up loads of injuries hopefully.

“We have a couple but they are not muscle injuries.

“We are a little behind on game time, but that is not an excuse, we are now picking up the reigns and coming into a tough run of games.

“We have Hungerford on Saturday, then Havant and Waterlooville away, then Lymington at home and then Hungerford away again.

"It's a tough run of games - which is good - which is what you want in pre-season because you can learn things and we’ll start working more and more on our shape.

“I was pleased with the attacking shape tonight but I just wasn’t pleased with the defending.”

“We had people play 90 minutes Friday, we had a few play 90 minutes again tonight, that wasn't my aim actually, we had some more kids on the bench, but I wasn't going to take them off after that.”

A disappointing result but clearly some lessons will have be learned and those problems can be addressed starting with the visit of Hungerford this Saturday.

The National League South side will provide a much tougher test for Gale’s squad, but with more minutes behind them hopefully the performance will be much improved.