'Disappointed' Thomas accepts poor recruitment contributed to Cobblers' relegation

A 'very disappointed' Kelvin Thomas accepts Cobblers simply haven't been 'good enough' this season following confirmation of their relegation at the weekend.

Town's return to the third tier has been cut all-too short following an underwhelming campaign that will come to an end at Sunderland on Sunday.

Thomas believes there are a number of reasons that have led to relegation but poor recruitment last summer is arguably the most significant.

"It's very disappointing," admitted Thomas. "I don't think it's just about the recruitment because there are some other factors that contributed.

"Last summer was difficult because the turnaround was very quick and that made it challenging, but potentially we didn't make decisions as quickly as we should have done.

"It's hard when you go up into League One because you go into a different player pool and some of the players you target have bigger options and they tend to hold out to see if those options fall into place.

"Sometimes you can wait a bit too long for one player and then miss out on another player, but also we didn't necessarily recruit to the style of play that Keith was looking to play.

"We didn't get the key figures right in terms of a target man and you also look at the three centre-halves which we lost last summer because those were three very solid players who would have done well in League One.

"We didn't replace them sufficiently at the time and I think at times we were unlucky with injuries, but we need to look at things and that's why we are making changes.

"We do tend to struggle when we go up into League One and that's something we need to address. We didn't go up with a top-three squad out of League Two. We had to fight and scrap into League One and with the players we came up with, we didn't add enough to that, especially in certain areas of the pitch.

"But we didn't get relegated because of the pitch or because of injuries or because of recruitment, we went down because of a combination of all of those things and fundamentally we weren't good enough and we didn't win enough football matches."