Danny Senda felt that Leyton Orient were naive in the second half of their defeat at Cambridge

Assistant head coach Senda was in charge from the touchline with O’s boss Ross Embleton self-isolating, though Embleton was still making decisions for substitutions from home.

Orient led at the break through Danny Johnson’s goal, but Cambridge responded to win 2-1 courtesy of goals in quick succession from Wes Hoolahan and Paul Mullin five minutes after half-time.

“We started the first half on the front foot, gained territory, put them under pressure, we were nullifying their threat, everything we spoke about before the game,” said Senda. “But it’s another second half of, quite frankly, naivety.

“We talked about what we need to do to approach the second half and we didn’t do it. If you don’t do it against teams with good players, goal scorers, you get punished at any level. It’s a naivety that’s crept in and we need to get rid of it very, very quickly. As a collective unit we need to be able to see games out.

“In the first half we go 1-0 up, deservedly in my opinion, and then in the second half we allow teams back into the game. It’s an uphill battle to try and get ourselves back into the game that we should have never been fighting for. If we don’t apply ourselves you don’t win football matches.”

Mark Bonner spoke of his pleasure at seeing his Cambridge team respond to a disappointing first half.

“We said that the difference between our good stuff and bad stuff in the first half was too big,” Bonner said. “We had flashes in the first half where we looked good, but we never sustained them for long enough. We felt if we could do that and have a period of sustained pressure we could come out on top of that spell, and that’s exactly what they did in the second half.

“There was a little bit of edginess, of anxiety in the performance in the first half. We know what our record’s been when we’ve fallen behind, we’ve only won once, so we needed to turn that round and it’s really pleasing that we had the quality and the mentality to do it as well. The first 20 minutes of the second half I thought we were brilliant.

“We had an angry group of boys training this week that really wanted to put it right. I didn’t have to work too hard to create a mentality to do that. Today was more about making sure we didn’t lose our way in the game just because we lost confidence in it. The response in the second half was outstanding.”