Bobby Olejnik delighted with league return and not giving up on promotion dream with Mansfield Town

It wasn't the best of days as Stags crashed 3-0 at home to Cheltenham Town, but Olejnik said they were not giving up on their promotion dream.

On his return to league action, he said: “It was obviously nice to be back playing a game. Being out for a whole year you don't realise how much you miss it.

“All the credit has to go to the medical staff and to the manager for believing in me, also to Aidan (Stone) and Conrad (Logan) for pushing me.

“How I have got back and all the training is down to those two.

READ THE MATCH REPORT

“They have been unbelievable in training and I just wanted to challenge myself against them.

“It's nice to be out there again.

“The manager called me up on Friday and said I'm going to make a change and play you. I think I just blurted out that I was buzzing. It was a nice feeling.

“It's nice the manager believed in me and I am going to try to repay that.”

On today's game, Olejnik said: “It was frustrating. If you take away the goals conceded it was actually a good performance.

“There weren't many shots on target and I didn't have much to do.

“We are talking amongst ourselves, trying to work out why it's not clicking at the minute. We just need to stick together and work as hard as we can.

“You look at our dressing room and no matter what game we've played, we've got so many great players in there so there's something not quite right at the moment.

“We can out-play any team in the league but we just have to better in both boxes.

“Confidence plays a part. The way the results are going, the atmosphere at home games is sometimes not the best.

“The fans have big expectations of us and so have we. All we can do is keep going and train as hard as we can.”

But he stressed there was a lot of the season still to play and Stags could yet come good.

“If we were to give up now, what would be the point of playing? We might as well go on holiday now,” he said.

“We have to believe. You look at the league and no one is really pulling away. We just need to stay in there and keep picking up some results. It's almost halfway though the season and so why not have a good run in the second half.

“It's happened before – teams have done that. There is only us stopping ourselves from doing that.”