Michael Appleton: There’s a question mark over my Charlton side’s desire after defeat at Lincoln City

Michael Appleton says he didn’t see enough desire and application from his Charlton side as they fell to a 3-1 loss at Lincoln City.

The defeat ended the Charlton manager’s unbeaten start as the South Londoners’ long search for an away win continued.

Alfie May had edged the Addicks ahead on 10 minutes but the tide turned as Hakeeb Adelakun levelled just beyond the half-hour mark.

The Imps were on top and led within 15 minutes of the restart as an unmarked Adelakun latched on to the excellent Lasse Sorensen’s centre.

The hosts were out of sight 13 minutes from time when Sean Roughan took advantage of more generous defending to poke beyond Ashley Maynard-Brewer.

Charlton are winless on the road this season and saw their seven-game unbeaten run ended in Lincolnshire.

Appleton said: “It’s very frustrating. You don’t mind losing games of football if you’ve seen a desire and application from your players to really want to try and compete with the opposition. We fell short in that area tonight. They won a lot of battles, a lot of duels. That enabled them to play in our half of the pitch. Once you do that with sides like Lincoln, who are very aggressive, you put yourselves in a lot of danger.

“You could argue that the third goal killed the game off and it clearly did – as that how it ended up. But even when the second goal went in, I was a little bit concerned that we didn’t look like we could get back into it. That was a little bit concerning. They have been on a good run, the lads. I can’t fault the way they’ve applied themselves over the last six weeks. There’s been a question mark over it tonight. That’s all it is at this moment in time, a question mark. I’d like to think we’ll get a positive response on Saturday.

“There’s been times in this short spell I’ve been at the club where we’ve not been great at times. We’ve had to dig in and deal with a bit of pressure, but we found a way of doing that. Tonight could have been another opportunity to do that and we didn’t. We need to look into that. Why did we not have the response we’ve had in previous games?

“We stopped passing the ball behind them and down the side of them. We passed it in front of them, which is a criticism I had when I first came into the football club having watched the first few games of the season. When you do that, you make it easy for the opposition. It’s something we can look at.

“I’ve got no doubt that there’s one or two players in the dressing room who will be disappointed with the manner of how we conceded. They were almost soft goals. When we’re conceding those type of goals, I’d like to think we had a little bit more about us.”