After thumping Bishop Auckland 8-0 on Tuesday night, it was something of a shock for Quakers to lose by such a margin against a useful-looking Spennymoor side.

“You’ve got to give credit to Spennymoor, they played well, but we weren’t at our best,” said Atkinson, who watched Buxton play on Saturday.

“One or two players in our team were below par, but the performance shows that we still have a couple of things to work on. This is what pre-season is all about.

“We have a couple of training sessions scheduled for this week, so we’ll be working on those as well as the other things that we would have been working on anyway.”