GLENN Howes has taken “full responsibility” for Dorchester Town’s 5-0 loss to Plymouth Parkway.

The Magpies now have four consecutive losses at Bolitho Park, conceding 12 unanswered goals in the process.

Reece Thomson and Callum Hall put Parkway into a 2-0 lead midway through the first half, before a booking in either period for Jack Dickson put Dorchester down to ten men.

Jack Crago’s double and a Matt Wright header made sure of Dorchester’s heaviest defeat since a 6-1 home drubbing to Poole in April.

READ MORE: Plymouth Parkway 5-0 Dorchester Town - report

Coming off the back of three wins in four matches, the result will sting further for the Magpies and Howes took the blame on his shoulders.

He told Echosport: “I take full responsibility, I’m not going to mask away from that.

“We tried things that clearly didn’t work. We haven’t had a good time of it down here.

“How I set the team up, how I expect us to play, the details, the information, the selection is on me.

“That’s the real reason I feel we’ve not come away with anything more competitive on the night.”

He added: “We understood it’s a difficult place to play and we haven’t had an awful lot of success going down there.

“We were under no illusions, they’re a very good side in their own right but equally we felt we’d been playing quite well ourselves of late.”

Howes said the poor first half brought back painful memories of last season’s 3-0 defeat at Parkway, when Dorchester were 2-0 down in nine minutes.

He said: “It’s a real uphill task and we had a déjà vu moment from the Tuesday (in February) when we came down here and got caught cold.

“They’ve gone after us and we haven’t been able to settle. There needs to be a lot of credit for Plymouth in how they went after us.

“Equally, we’ve got to be prepared for that and unfortunately I don’t think we were.

“We really found it a difficult evening. There were no chances in the first half and we struggled to get out. The tenacity and enthusiasm of Parkway really penned us back.”

Dissecting Dickson’s red card, Howes felt the right-back was a victim of the FA’s strict new rules on time-wasting.

Dickson’s first yellow card was shown when he touched the ball away at a set-piece, despite there being 56 minutes to play.

“That’s not the be all and end all why we lost the game,” Howes insisted.

“I thought it was an unfortunate sending off. The first one, the officials are clamping down on pushing the ball away. He’s judged it as a part of time-wasting.

“The second one, Jack has unfortunately slipped over and gone into the lad. The referee has reacted and made the decision, which we felt was very harsh.”

With Parkway netting three times in 13 minutes late in the second half, Howes denied tiredness had played a factor in inflating the scoreline.

He said: “You (can) go to a passive element where you try to defend your distances and spaces and get men behind the ball.

“It was damage limitation at that point. We still tried to push players forward and clearly that didn’t work, it left us more vulnerable to conceding and that was the case.”

Dorchester have ten days before visiting Merthyr Town in the FA Trophy third qualifying round on Saturday, October 7 (3pm).