Max Porter insists it’s about time Newport County started learning from their mistakes, writes Michael Pearlman.

County were again defeated at the weekend by a solitary goal, the ninth time they’ve done so since Boxing Day.

“The York game was the story of the second half of our season, we’ve lost countless games by a single goal and we are disappointed in that, we come off feeling we’ve played well against a good side who have made the play-offs,” Porter said.

“We congratulate them, but we’ve dominated the game and again we’ve lost and it’s a horrible habit that we’ve got that we can’t take forward into next season.

“I don’t think we did much wrong with conceding the freekick, Kevin has made a challenge and we talked last week about players looking for fouls and then the free kick has gone Macca’s (Ian McLoughlin) side, but it’s difficult to know where to put the wall when the free kick is dead central.

“We are disappointed; we shouldn’t have lost the game, that’s the bottom line.”

Porter insists the players are aware of their shortcomings.

“Before the game we’d have taken the level of performance we produced, but it is a results business and we’ve got to make sure next season we add a more clinical touch in both penalty boxes,” he said.

“We had it last season and we had it up until Christmas and need to get back to that. We’ve all got to improve.

“We should’ve scored in the game and we again talked last week about momentum and looking at York and you’ve got to say, they are a great example of that.

“They’ve had 14 clean sheets in 16 games and look really solid, that’s the key to their success and last year we did the same.

“At the end of the season when we had all those games we had loads of clean sheets, we were winning games 1-0 and drawing 0-0 and it gives you such a great chance of winning games.

“We had a really good following today as well and we are disappointed for them.

“Things have changed in terms of expectation, half way through the season we had real belief and we’ve had a torrid second half of the season.

“We’ll be stronger for it next season, we need to be intelligent as players and learn from our mistakes.”