Crawley Town head coach Gabriele Cioffi expects improvement against MK Dons

He is looking for a much-improved display having analysed what went wrong during their 5-1 humiliation at Tranmere Rovers.

Cioffi believes the surprise result came from not winning their tackles and not defending set-pieces.

He said: “When you don’t win, you learn. We had a big lesson.

“What we learnt was simple - we are able to play football if we are able to win every challenge.

“The game started with every challenge lost, we lost confidence the will to not concede.

“The lesson is massive and important we have learned from it.

“We came from two amazing performances against Newport County and Exeter and we thought that came from our skill.

“But it came from the challenges, the one v ones won.

“You can’t start thinking it’s all from your skill; we are not at that level at the moment.

“We failed to defend the set-pieces which is funny because in the last seven, eight, nine, ten games we were the only team unbeaten in set-pieces.”