THE prospect of Worcester City treading mid-table water would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

Having been in the Blue Square Bet North play-off picture virtually all season, it has been a case of looking up rather than down the league for the St George’s Lane club.

Yet, according to captain Stuart Whitehead, they are in danger of falling away if they don’t start to buck their ideas up.

It is an opinion difficult to argue with as while Worcester have been dropping points left, right and centre, so the teams below them are slowly reeling them in.

They might remain in the upper echelons of the division but, before last night’s matches, 16th-placed Workington were only seven points behind them.

Although Worcester’s top-five aspirations cannot be written off, Whitehead believes the alarm bells are ringing.

The City skipper said: “Rather than look to the play-offs at the moment, we’ve got to look at getting our own house in order and sorting our own performances out because we are looking good one week and then we look a different team the next.

“We need to start getting consistency. I know you don’t get that with a young team but we’ve still got experience in there so we’ve got to start producing otherwise there’s no point looking at the play-offs.

“It’s all over the place at the moment with the games teams have played and I think, once everyone catches up, we could find ourselves down in 14th or something ridiculous like that.”

He continued: “If we want to salvage anything for the rest of the season we’ve got to do something, stand up and be counted and start producing performances on the pitch.

“Individually, not enough of us are doing that at the moment and until we’ve got eight or nine in the team producing performances we’re not going to win the games that we need to.”

The former Kidderminster Harriers central defender also shares the frustrations of everyone else connected with Worcester City — the fact that they have some excellent players but can’t string two victories together.

Following 3-1 defeats to Solihull Moors and Harrogate Town, City return to St George’s Lane this Saturday to take on second-placed Guiseley.

Whitehead said: “It’s hard to take really because we play well in spells and then we just have five or 10-minute spells when we’ve been all over the place and it’s happened all season.

“It’s cost us so we’ve got to learn quickly.

“At the moment you don’t know what you’re going to get from our team.

“Small individual mistakes are costing us and we’re just not doing enough to win games at the moment.

“That’s the most frustrating thing because you can’t put your finger on why that is.”

He added: “Against Solihull it was a couple of individual mistakes, they hit us on the counter and we didn’t penetrate them enough.

“Last Saturday we had good spells but Harrogate kept the ball better than us, they looked more dangerous than us and were by far the better team.”