JOHN MCCOMBE says he can ‘fully understand’ the angry reaction from Chester fans after a record equalling 14th home league game without a win.

The Blues were comprehensively beaten 2-0 by Cheshire rivals Macclesfield Town on Monday, with under-pressure manager Jon McCarthy facing calls to resign at the full-time whistle from bitterly disappointed Blues’ fans, who haven’t witnessed a victory at home since December 17.

Monday’s defeat means Chester are now one game away from a club record 15 home games without a win, having already equalled the 14-match streak which spanned across the 2008/09 and 2009/10 campaigns.

“I can understand. They come to watch Chester and they want to see us win, so they’re disappointed,” said club captain McCombe, an ever-present so far this season.

“I thought the fans, throughout the game, were pretty good.

“At the Sutton game there were a few groans in that first-half and disappointments but I felt (against Macclesfield) they really got behind us and they helped us raise our game and try to give them something more to get behind and cheer about, but we failed to do that.

“We’ve got a good team, we’ve got a good manager as well. The lads are right behind the gaffer as well, we’re confident in how the gaffer wants to play and like I’ve said before, he’s good in the way he sends us out with the right information.

“It’s up to us on the pitch to carry out how he wants us to play and it clearly wasn’t good enough. We’ve got to take the blame for that, not the manager on this occasion.”

Mercifully for McCarthy and his 20th-placed side, they now face back-to-back away trips to firstly Torquay United on Saturday (3pm) before the rearranged clash at Solihull Moors on Tuesday night (7.45pm).

McCombe, who joined the Blues from Macclesfield in the summer, believes Chester can put their poor run behind them and claim a maximum six points out of six to ease the growing pressure on their manager.

“Every game is winnable in this league,” he added. “I’ve played in the Conference and League Two for a long time now, and I know we are good enough to beat anyone in this league, as anyone is in this division.

“Torquay and Solihull are two teams that we feel we can go to and get six points against, which would help turn our season around.

“We need to pick ourselves up from this, and I think we will, we have a strong group of players in there and we’ll pick ourselves up knowing we’ve not done ourselves justice.”

Facing his former club, McCombe was understandably ‘gutted’ to lose out in such fashion against John Askey’s Silkmen, who also included former Blues’ winger Elliott Durrell in their midfield.

“I’m gutted really because we didn’t play well enough and got nothing out of the game,” the 32-year-old added.

“It’s not a good feeling. We know we’ve let ourselves down, let the gaffer down and let the staff down as well. We know we’re a lot better than that and all-in-all we’re really disappointed.

“We’ve deserved something out of every game (before Macclesfield) for one reason or another. In parts of other games we’ve not played that well, the first-half against Sutton wasn’t up to the standard, but second-half of that game we played really well.

“A lot of games we’ve deserved something but we haven’t played as well as we could here. If we did get a goal back we could’ve come back and we did have two or three chances where if we’d scored we could have got back into it, but we haven't played well enough to deserve a point from that game.”