Harry Wheeler said it was easy to make so many changes for Maidstone’s defeat at Barrow.

The Stones are second-bottom in the National League, four points from safety, after losing 1-0 yesterday.

Wheeler made eight changes for the trip to Holker Street in a bid to halt their bad run.

Only one was enforced with Ross Worner coming in for goalkeeper Grant Smith, who had been recalled by Lincoln.

But Wheeler said Dan Wishart, Sean Shields and Rob Swaine would all have featured against Oldham last weekend had they not been cup-tied.

The Stones boss said: “When you’ve lost three in a row I don’t think it’s brave, I think it’s quite easy.

“We have to make those changes.

"They were only forced last week because they were cup-tied, those lads would have played.

“If it was coming off a league game and we’d made eight out of 11 I think you might look at it differently.

“I don’t say it was brave, I think we needed to do something to turn it around.”

A number of regulars were axed with Alex Finney out of the squad and Jack Paxman, Will De Havilland, Jack Powell and Elliott Romain dropping to the bench.

Wheeler said: “If we’d just stood still and kept doing the same things, the same results are going to happen.

“The same outcome’s happened again but I think the people that were here and some of the fans I spoke to at the end, they could see the desire, the solidarity.

“We made changes because we needed to. That doesn’t mean now we’ve lost we’re going to make changes again, there’s got to be a structure to it. Play like that and we’ll get results.”

Wheeler felt for debutant keeper Worner, whose fumble led to Barrow’s second-half winner.

It was hard on the on-loan Sutton man, who had kept Maidstone in the game.

Wheeler said: “The keeper’s made a mistake. He was absolutely brilliant apart from that and I hope people go and look at that and look at how good he was, because he doesn’t deserve anything negative for it.

“He’s made a mistake but it just seems at the moment someone makes one, we get punished and that’s how it’s going.

"The biggest thing now is to stick together.

“He’s had a brilliant game, an excellent game, some first-class saves and he’s been punished.

“He doesn’t deserve that one, we probably don’t deserve that one but at the moment that’s three league losses in a row and every one we’ve been punished for anything that someone’s done."

Read the match report from Maidstone's defeat at Barrow