Of support through darkest hours

to try to turn them back into focusing on the game itself rather than the one or two negative reactions because you don’t want it to be toxic at home, and it wasn’t toxic.

“The fans are not happy and I understand them not being happy but it can get a lot worse. I’ve had it myself, when I was at Blackburn I was booed off the pitch personally on my own when we were going for promotion and we lost three or four on the bounce.

“You have got to build your character, your grit, your desire to prove people wrong, instead of going with the flow you have got to change direction, change the mentality of the people criticising you. And the only way of doing that is being brave and then brave performances hopefully turn into good results.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s Checkatrade Trophy clash against Manchester City unde 23s, Hill said there was a lot of tiredness among his squad.

“There’s a lot of mental tiredness, fatigue,” he said.

“But it’s a great game on Tuesday and I’m looking forward to it.

“They are a magical team to watch, even at under 21 and under 23 level.

“They are amazing and it’s going to be brilliant to take them on. I have a restriction in that I have to pick four players who meet certain criteria.

“If I could do, with the amount of games we’ve played recently, I’d try to change of all eleven, but I can’t do that and meet the criteria. I want to win this game.”