GRAFT and craft will be the maxim drilled into Terry Dolan's suffering York City squad this week.

The no-nonsense City chief refused to shy away from the Minstermen's problem's after Saturday's 1-0 defeat at Hartlepool.

"We are playing like a team in the bottom three or four at the moment," he conceded.

"Very tentative is a general description of our play.

"In most respects there is no need to be because we just encourage the players to believe in themselves but they're not doing so.

"The only answer is hard work and more hard work and more hard work."

The City chief admitted York, particularly in the second-half, failed to make good their possession and wasted too many opportunities to deliver a telling cross.

"I sat the players down at the finish and I asked Alan (Fettis) how many shots he had to save, particularly in the second-half, and I think he had two.

"But for all the possession we had we didn't create anything and it is ironical that we have brought someone in who will score goals and yet in his first game we didn't provide him with anything.

"In the last two or three games, there has been a lot of chances created but there has been nobody there to finish them off."

Despite debutant Alex Mathie failing to kick-start his City career with a goal, Dolan said he was pleased with his new signing's performance and insisted the goals will come.

"He will get better as he goes along. You can see he hasn't played for three or four weeks because he was getting half a turn on a defender and they were just managing to get a tackle in.

"He knows what he is doing and I have no problems about what Alex is going to do for us.

"But we are going to have to provide better service. When we got the ball into the last third or into wide areas too many times we just banged it up into the air for the 'keeper to come and collect."