The Reds play Wellington away on New Year’s day and will be looking to get its second win of the season after downing the Nix 2-0 in early December.

McGowan felt after claiming the 2016 A-League Championship it was easy to criticise from the outside.

“It’s the whole group - players, coaches and the club. We have to stick together in these moments,” McGowan said.

“It’s easy for people… we’re a target now, people to shoot us down, we’re bottom of the league, we’re champions.

“We’re an easy target and sitting ducks at the moment, but within the club we need to stay together.”

“We think we’re better, the table doesn’t lie, we’re there for a reason and I think with our performances recently we’ve shown why we’re at the bottom.

“Within the squad we know we’re a good team, we’re just not showing it at the moment.”

McGowan said it was difficult to identify what was the key issue in their poor performances, but felt it was down to structure and being outnumbered in defence.

He also backed coach Guillermo Amor after stating he heard criticisms regarding their tactics this season.

“You won’t hear anything from me asking for him to leave or players to leave or better recruitment, that’s not my business… it’s winning football games and we’re not doing that at the moment,” he said.

“We play what we try to play exactly how he sets us up, there’s a lot of passing around I know the fans sometimes aren’t happy about but that’s through instruction.

“We’re not out there passing for the sake of it, but this is how we play and how we want to play, it’s how work on playing every day in training.

“We’re trying to fulfil his game plan to the best of our ability, it’s obviously not working at the moment and it’s down to us collectively to work out why.”

McGowan also said it was important take out positives in games despite losing otherwise they risk losing confidence.

“We’ve got thousands of fans sticking the boot into us at the moment, if you can’t take the positives out of it then you might as well pack up and go home,” McGowan said.

“It’s a difficult one for Guillermo to find out, I think us as players we’re players struggling to find out what’s going wrong and at this time I think we need everyone to improve.

“He’ll work a way to beat Wellington and we’ll follow that game plan and do it to the best of our ability.”