Lee Johnson will be 'devastated' if he breaks Barnsley's record for consecutive league defeats in the vital coming week.

The Reds have lost eight league games in a row for the first time since the 1958/59 season while they are dangerously close to the club record of nine, set in 1952/53, ahead of trips to Johnson's former club Oldham Athletic tomorrow and in-form Peterborough United on Tuesday.

"I really don't want to be the man who breaks that record," the head coach told the Chronicle yesterday.

"I want to be breaking the positive records not the negative ones. If it happens, I will be devastated, but I don't think it will."

Barnsley are second bottom of League One and have suffered the joint most league defeats in the top four divisions of English football this season with 11 in their 17 matches. At the start of the campaign, Johnson said he was hoping for a promotion push but finds his side 13 points off the top six.

Asked if he had ruled out a charge for the play-offs, he said: "At this stage we have to embrace where we are.  If I started talking about the top six at this point, people would laugh at me. "The initial phase is to get out of this trouble, build some momentum and then try to kick on.  All I will say is that you have seen it happen last year with us (when Johnson took the Reds briefly into the top six after a six-match winning run), so it is still possible."