WESTON boss Craig Laird said his team are not panicking after the Seagulls suffered their second heavy defeat of the season on Tuesday night.

The Seagulls travelled to Basingstoke desperate to regroup after Saturday’s 4-0 home loss to Dartford, but their fragile defence was breached twice in the first seven minutes.

With Basingstoke’s first attack in the fifth minute Stuart Lake scored with a shot that took a deflection, before David Pratt added a second only two minutes later.

They were further behind after 24 minutes when Pratt grabbed his second as Weston struggled to break out of their own half.

Craig’s team improved after the break, and pulled a goal back in the 67th minute when Nat Pepperell put Matt Huxley through to score, but Basingstoke substitute Matt Warner extinguished the Weston fightback when he beat Lloyd Irish from close range in the 90th minute.

Of his team’s start, which sees his team second bottom of the early Blue Square South table, Craig said: “It’s definitely not the start we’d been looking for.

“Losing someone like Craig Rand over the summer, and then having key players like Matt Villis and Brett Trowbridge out with injuries or illness at the beginning of the season has really had a big effect.

“But we’ve got to get on with it, and the players at the club have got to fill their quite big boots.

“The only good thing is that we are having these results at the beginning of the season, when we have 40 games left in the season to put it right and pick up the right results.”

Looking back to Tuesday’s match Craig said: “We didn’t play too badly for a lot of the match, but we were let down by some sloppy defending.

“We had a great opportunity to pull another goal back when we were 3-1 down in the second half which I think could have seen us push on to get an equaliser, but we didn’t take that opportunity and then they scored again at the end.

“There’s no need to panic at the moment, we’re going to be practising our defending a lot in our training sessions over the next week to make sure if we can get rid of these errors.

“I’m really disappointed, but I’m in no way beginning to panic, we’ve got a game against Thurrock on Saturday which is now a lot bigger for us than it would have been if we had picked up six points by now so we’ll try our best to get a result on the weekend.”

As well as Brett Trowbridge, Craig will be without Chris Young and Jamie Price for Saturday’s trip to Essex, but he says he may have one or two fresh faces for his squad by the weekend.

Craig revealed the club are looking at an unnamed centre-back and are likely to make a move before the weekend, while he is also close to securing a loan deal for a central midfielder from a Blue Square Premiere team as well.

He added: “We’ve been monitoring these two players and I’d like to have them in the squad for Saturday, so we’ll see what we can do.”