COME the end of the season, how points were amassed won’t matter. All that will matter is whether or not we have enough points to satisfy Martin Gray. While three points were secured at Bradford Park Avenue, we went around all of the houses to get there and, like last Saturday, we made a team struggling for form look, for a period at least, half decent.

With a quarter of the season complete, it seems to be the in thing to have a report. For me, we’ve had an excellent start to the season. Eleven games in and we’re one point off the top of the league having endured a brutal run of fixtures in the opening month or so of the season. Despite that, it could be better. Some will think that’s being greedy. Some will think that after four years of constantly winning, we need to dial back our expectations. For me (and I suspect Martin Gray too), playoffs are the target.

In recent years, we have become accustomed to conceding sloppy goals. Last season, for example, you could count with your hands how many well-worked goals we conceded. The same could be said for the year before. However, over the course of those seasons, we managed to keep our goals conceded down to below one per game over the season. That’s always the target. This year, despite utilising the same formation and to a certain extent the same players, we’re conceding even more sloppy goals. I guess that will be the step up in quality from last season. We’re making similar, needless mistakes but they’re getting punished more frequently by better opposition players.

We faced a similar situation at the start of last season, conceding too many goals, and Gray fixed it. If I were a betting man, I would stick a quid on the Darlo boss doing it again. It also wouldn’t surprise me if there were some personnel changes in the coming weeks to help with that challenge. We certainly need to become less vulnerable to the counter attack and in particular long balls over the top.

While poor defending is our Achilles heel at the moment, team spirit is our real strength. Once again on Wednesday night, all of the team’s mental reserves were required to drag the game back in our favour. Lesser teams would wilt. In fairness, I suspect Bradford did. We kept going. Eventually, we got a deserved winner, even if we were a little fortuitous in how it arrived.

With midweek league fixtures now a thing of the past for the coming months, we can hopefully settle down in to a more relaxing rhythm of one game per week. With a couple of weekends being kept free for the next couple of rounds of qualifying games, there is no excuse for us not to pour our full resources in to a decent stab at a cup run.

The draw has been reasonably kind to us for the second qualifying round with a trip to Lancaster City. If we field a full strength team (a big if under Martin Gray’s stewardship) we should have more than enough to overcome the Dolly Blues. However, trying to gauge what sort of form they’re in is a bit hard considering they’ve only played five league games, two of which have been at the Giant Axe.

Hopefully, come five o’clock on Saturday we can make our way back over the Pennines with a ball in the bag for Monday’s third qualifying round draw and the £4,500 prize money that comes with the win.