AFTER his side slipped closer to the Championship trapdoor, Phil Parkinson admits he is desperate to get his players recreating the blood-and-guts display that saw them beat Millwall.

Wanderers’ 5-2 thumping at Wigan saw their odds of being relegated to League One move to 1/100.

Visibly downbeat after the humiliating derby defeat, Parkinson admitted his aim was to rekindle the spirit of the side that had tamed the Lions two weeks earlier.

Only Pawel Olkowski and Sammy Ameobi missed out from the starting team with injury niggles, though both had come on by the time the second half kicked off at Wigan.

“I tried to get the team as close to the team that played Millwall, which was one of our best displays of the season,” he said at the DW Stadium.

“It is a dark day for us, there’s no question about that. We were desperate to lift everybody and get a result, and the frustrating thing is we created some chances and I felt we had opportunities to score.

“But every time we gave ourselves a chink of light we got punished at the other end.

“It’s a windy, horrible day – we played Millwall two weeks ago in similar circumstances against a really physical team and we’d stood strong. as a side, and offered them very little.

“But today in our back third we were second best, and if their front four have the beating of our defenders like that you’re always going to come under pressure.”

Wigan’s third goal, scored after a calamitous error by keeper Remi Matthews, all but killed the game off 10 minutes into the second half.

And while Matthews has been rightly receiving rave reviews since coming into the team in place of Ben Alnwick, Parkinson refused to excuse his mistake, gifting the ball to Michael Jacobs, who in turn offered up a simple tap-in for team-mate Nick Powell.

“The nature of the third goal, in particular, summed up our afternoon and the way it’s been going. It’s ridiculous.

“It happened earlier this week in the Carlisle-Notts County game, and sometimes when players see something like that on the telly, they copy it. I’ve said to Remi it’s a basic thing as a goalkeeper, you look around you. It’s a very poor error.”