Cambridge United 0-2 Lincoln City: Garry Monk felt players lacked ‘character’ and ‘personality’ as winless start to season continued with loss at Abbey Stadiun

Garry Monk felt that his Cambridge United players showed a lack of ‘character’ and ‘personality’ as their winless start to the season continued with a 2-0 defeat at home to Lincoln City this afternoon.

Goals in either half from Freddie Draper and Bailey Cadamarteri secured the visiting Imps a comfortable three points at the Cledara Abbey Stadium – and as a result it means that it is now 10 matches without a victory for Monk’s men in 2024/25. And if you factor in the back end of the previous campaign, United have not tasted victory since 1 April – a run of 16 games and 180 days.

Despite the struggle for positive results, in the main Monk has been pleased with certain aspects of most performances this term.

However, today he admitted that his players were well below the required levels – and he has challenged them to show some ‘fight’ ahead of Tuesday evening’s home encounter against Rotherham United.

“When you’ve got adversity and you’re in a situation like this where you’re not winning games, you need really strong character and personality to come out of the other side of it and give yourself a building block,” he said.

“We’ve taken a lot of adversity but I didn’t see enough of that personality today. That’s probably the furthest we’ve been away in all the games, especially in that second half.

“I can understand it in a certain respect with the situation the players are in, and like I said, you need strong characters to come through it.

“I’ve been in the game long enough – your duty is to work hard and take what’s coming at you. You’re either going to fight or take flight. My mentality has always been to fight and try to put that across to the players.

“I think they are fighting but confidence is a little bit lower than it should be, but there’s only one way out of it and that’s showing character. We’ve done that in a lot of games but this one was too far away from that.

“The only option is to fight – that’s my mentality. I’ll always fight as hard I can and I expect my players to do that as well.”

United remain rooted to the foot of the League One table with one point from a possible 21.