Despite losses to Barnet and Salford City, Dons’ promotion fate remains in their hands

With their automatic promotion fate still in their hands with 18 points to play for, Gethin Jones said no-one is panicking in the MK Dons dressing room.

Saturday’s defeat to Salford City was their second in succession, having been turned over by Barnet seven days prior, seeing their gap back to the play-off spots cut to just a couple of points now with Cambridge United - who have a game in hand - dropping to fourth.

Results elsewhere over the weekend were kind to Dons though, with leaders Bromley and the U’s both suffering rare defeats, with Notts County the big, and only winners in the top four.

Staying in second place despite suffering their first back-to-back defeats since September, Dons defender Jones said their fate remains firmly in their own hands and they haven no reason to panic heading into the Easter weekend fixtures.

“The results have been kind which makes it more frustrating, but we just concentrate on ourselves and look to next weekend,” he said after the defeat to Salford. “It’s still in our hands, and it makes the last two games even more frustrating but we need to focus on ourselves and hopefully get the three points on Friday.

“We had the wobble in September, and we know these last two games haven’t been good enough. It’s still in our hands.

“This is what you play football for. We all know what the goal is.

“Because of the great run we’ve been on, we are disappointed and surprised. We’ve said though that we don’t need to panic, we know what we’re good at, we just need to get back to basics and results will come again.”

He continued: “We haven’t lost back-to-back games since September, so we’ve got to dust ourselves down, look at ourselves in the mirror, work on the basics again.

“It’s one thing we’ve been good at - coming to places like this and normally we’ve come away with a point. To have back-to-back defeats is disappointing but we’ve got six cup finals to go.”