Leyton Orient’s performance against Grimsby Town on Saturday was less about a so-called new manager bounce and more about the players performing well and working hard, says head coach Ross Embleton.

The O’s, despite not getting the win, looked far better than Grimsby for large parts of the game and managed to just about salvage something to show for it when Lee Angol equalised from the penalty spot in stoppage time.

However, Embleton feels that was less to do with it being his first game in permanent charge and more the players working hard for each other to get out of the current run of results.

He said: “The good thing for me is the boys were bang at it and they worked hard, but I don’t think we would have come off the pitch saying ‘it was a new manager bounce and we all had a right go’.

“I remember when we beat Sutton just after Justin came in and we absolutely ran them into the ground. I didn’t feel like that was our performance at the weekend, I felt like our performance at the weekend had a bit more control about it.

“We had more time on the ball than the other team did, we put better crosses into the box, albeit we didn’t convert them. What pleased me the most was that side of the performance, we looked a little bit more like we had done on occasions earlier in the season.”

There were a number of games in Embleton’s first interim tenure of the season where performances from his side were worthy of more than they were being rewarded with, and Embleton felt like Saturday’s game was similar to those, especially with Mariners boss Ian Holloway coming to the same conclusion himself.

Embleton said: “The big thing for me was when we played Crewe, they nicked the game off us; we played Exeter away and they nicked a point off us; we played a couple of other games in a period where we weren’t winning the games that I felt we were much closer to winning, like Port Vale when we drew or Stevenage when we drew, or Crawley, games where we were much better than them but didn’t win the games.

“Coming off then and having the managers saying to me ‘one of the best teams we’ve played’, I think that then starts sending those messages and Saturday felt like that. The fact the manager followed up with his comments to me after is quite reassuring.”

Part of the reason Orient have struggled to pick up the required results has been due to not replacing the goals of the Macauley Bonne and Josh Koroma strikeforce from last season.

Midfielder Josh Wright leads the scoring charts with seven, while the pair brought in to replace last season’s goals, Angol and Conor Wilkinson, each have four.

Embleton is aware of the situation, but also feels that finding a regular goalscorer at this level is a hard thing to do.

He said: “The recruitment of a goalscorer at this level is, when I say a lottery I don’t mean it in terms of that level of disrespect to the players that you bring in, but finding someone that is going to get you 10, 15, 20 goals a season is massive.

“Strikers on the whole at this level find themselves at this level because they might have gone and got 16 one year and then followed it up with seven the year later."