NEWPORT County AFC will be a team on a mission at Mansfield Town on Saturday with striker Padraig Amond insisting that the players are desperate to avenge last season’s 5-0 drubbing at Field Mill.

County were 4-0 down inside 35 minutes on their last visit to Mansfield in February – six days after their narrow defeat to Tottenham Hotspur at Wembley in the FA Cup fourth-round replay.

Alfie Potter completed his hat-trick after the break to condemn the Exiles to their worst defeat of the season.

Manager Michael Flynn said he was “ashamed” of the performance and the players later offered to refund the travel costs for fans who had made the journey north.

Amond admits that the defeat hurt the players and the fixture computer has handed them the chance to gain revenge in the very first match of the 2018-2019 campaign.

“Mansfield last year hurt all of us,” said the Irish front man. “It was the first thing everyone talked about when the fixtures came out.

“The lads that were here last year told the new lads coming in as well.

“We were really hurting that night. It was probably one of the worst 20-minute displays I’ve been involved in.

“Everything that could go wrong went wrong in those 20 minutes so we want to put that right.

“We’ve got different players and they’ve got a different management team but it makes no difference – we want go there and get a positive result this time.

“We owe ourselves that and we owe the fans that travelled up that night a lot more than they got that night.

“Hopefully we can start the season well and that gives us a good platform to build on.”

But if County are to get a positive result on Saturday they will have to improve on their performance in last week’s friendly defeat to Stoke City under-23s, according to Amond.

“I was happy to get 90 minutes in for the first time in pre-season but I was very disappointed with some aspects of the game,” said the 30-year-old, who headed in an equaliser against the Potters youngsters before two late Tyrese Campbell goals gave the visitors victory.

“For 40 minutes we were excellent but the other 50 minutes were a bit ropy.

“We started quite bright and for the first 20 minutes we penned them in but for some reason we sat back.

“And the same thing happened in the second half – we came out and looked really positive and got some good balls into their box.

“We got it back to 1-1 and then in the last 15 minutes it was very sloppy.

“We need to learn very quickly from that because if we play like that at Mansfield then there’ll be a repeat of what happened last season there.

“It’s going to be one of the toughest games of the season.

“They’ve made some very good signings over the summer so we’re going to have to be right at it to get a result there but we believe we can.”