Darlington defender Ryan Valentine admitted to being surprised when asked to play in an unfamiliar central midfield position in Saturday's defeat at Southend United.

The former Welsh under-21 international has made his name as a tough-tackling full-back, capable of playing on either flank, but despite a five-game unbeaten run manager David Hodgson tinkered with the side.

With Adrian Webster injured, Adolfo Gregorio swapped positions with Valentine, moving from central midfield to right wing-back - a position Valentine is very familiar with - while right-footed Neil Wainwright continued at left wing-back.

With a flexible squad at his disposal, Hodgson does have options, one of which was to put Brian Close back into central midfield. Instead Valentine was given the nod and another surprise was the use of defender Joe Kendrick in the centre of midfield when he came on as a late substitute.

Having been used in both wing-back positions and in central defence, playing alongside Neil Maddison at Southend was the fourth different position 22-year-old Valentine has been deployed in this season.

He said: "The idea was to have someone in there putting tackles in, putting a foot in and helping out the back three which is what I tried to do, but I didn't have the best of games to be honest.

"Because the manager knew Southend would be a strong and physical side, he said he wanted two sitting midfielders and only one attacking midfielder (Craig Hignett) rather than what we normally have, which is just Neil with two attacking midfielders (Gregorio and Webster) alongside him.

"He told me early in the week where I was going to play and I was surprised but I was prepared to play there.

"As long as I'm in the team I'm happy to be playing anywhere on the pitch."

Darlington's disjointed team performance bore little resemblance to their improved form of recent weeks that had seen Quakers start the year with five unbeaten games.

But at Southend, they rarely looked like they would take anything more than a point so it was no surpise when Mark Bentley opened the scoring with 13 minutes to play and Valentine admitted Darlington were on the backfoot from the beginning.

"We didn't start off well, right from the first minute they closed us down well, got stuck into us and we didn't pass the ball well at all," he said.

"I think we looked quite solid as a team and we defended quite well, but we were sloppy on the ball.

"To be fair to them, they did work hard and put us under pressure. They had a game-plan which they've probably worked on all week to stop us from playing so well done to them.

"There's no need to panic just yet, but you don't want one defeat to turn into two in a row so we've got to bounce back at Bury next Saturday and hopefully go on another unbeaten run."

Read more about the Quakers here.