Brian Brown has challenged his Vale side to win their remaining six matches after they fell to their heaviest defeat of the season in Saturday’s 5-2 loss away to Thorniewood.

High-flying Vale were pushing for a top two spot just weeks ago but Saturday’s Thorniewood loss and last weekend’s 3-0 defeat away to Ashfield have left them toiling down in fourth.

Vale now welcome fifth place Carluke this weekend and Brown has urged the ‘real Vale’ to show up and get back to winning ways.

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He said: “That’s two weeks in a row we haven’t turned up. I don’t want to start slating the players now as we’re all in it together but it’s been a couple of poor performances from us.

“The two bad results on the bounce have put a bit of a dent in our hopes, but we just need to get going again.

“It’s not the time for a bad run of results. We need to pick ourselves up and get back to it. A win on Saturday gets us right back in the mix. We can’t be all doom and gloom, we need to make sure we react in the last six games.

“It’s got to be three points against Carluke this weekend. Looking at it now, we probably need to win all of our games for the rest of the season. We’ve gone on runs like that before but it needs to start on Saturday now.

“We need to make sure it’s the real Vale who turn up, not the one we’ve had for the last couple of weeks.”