REFLECTING on what could have been has become a bit of a regular event on Saturday nights this season.

Like so many games, on Saturday against York City we managed to hand a victory to our opponents on a plate. When you cast aside the obvious significance of the fixture, with Martin Gray returning to Blackwell Meadows for the first time, what we got was an end-to-end game with plenty of entertainment and with Darlo once again holding their own against a better resourced team.

Against a full-time outfit packed with players who have operated at much higher levels than where they find themselves now, it’s hard to have too many gripes about 90 percent of the game. Did we have a good game? We weren’t amazing but considering how poor we’ve been for so long now, we did more than enough to keep York honest. We had our chances just like they had theirs and when Reece Styche put us in front just before half time, I don’t think York could have had too many complaints about going in to the break behind. Sadly, the half time cuppa seemed to be our undoing once again following the New Year’s Day capitulation at Harrogate.

When you consider how well we defended during the first half at Harrogate, a repeat performance during the second half on Saturday would have been very welcome, but for some reason we came out once again with heads and minds somewhere else.

To throw the lead away so quickly and submissively is probably more concerning than the actual result. With a nightmare run of fixtures coming to an end this Wednesday against Salford, I don’t think you’ll find many Darlo fans who sat down for the Christmas turkey thinking we would secure many points from those four games. The three points secured on Boxing Day were probably more than we could have hoped for. Nonetheless, to surrender the lead to York when they weren’t causing us major problems was so disappointing.

Every point between now and the end of the season is going to be so precious. They need to be protected when we have them. At the moment, I worry about how poorly we protect them.

While it would be great if we could get something from the Salford game on Wednesday, Saturday’s game at fellow strugglers Alfreton Town has become massive. We’ve got to start making some of the games against lower-ranked sides count. Having messed up at Gainsborough, we’ve got to knuckle down, keep things simple and hope that the much talked about quality and spirit within the squad comes to the fore. When you look at the table, there is very little in terms of points difference between the teams in the bottom half. As both FC United and Boston have proved in recent weeks, if you can string a handful of good results together, you can soon jump up the league and move away from the dreaded trap door. Sadly, both of those sides have benefitted from a new manager bounce. Unfortunately, our hoped for new manager bounce was more of a belly flop.

I guess the positive to take out of Saturday is if we perform to the same level and somehow cut out the silly mistakes, there are more than enough games against sides in and around us in the table for us to get out of this mess. What we can’t afford to do is play the likes of Alfreton on Saturday and reproduce the mistakes of Gainsborough, Harrogate and York. We’ve got to keep believing that it will finally click at some point. Hopefully, it won’t be too late.