I HAVE been encouraged by the determination and resilience we have shown in the last two games against Witham Town and Haringey Borough.

I believe we are still in a difficult moment and we have lost players we didn’t expect to lose. It’s taken the players a great deal of character to dig out some results.

Against Witham it was an old fashioned and roll your sleeves up performance. It was the platform we needed to do well against Haringey and it was a very enjoyable night and it allowed us to do well.

I asked a few questions of the players but I won’t forget it is early days whether you are flying or facing a hard moment.

Haringey had six or seven first team players out there on Tuesday but their priorities are elsewhere and that’s fine. We had 10 players available so we brought in four guys from the under-23s and Tom Hine back early following an ACL injury.

We were not all guns blazing and we didn’t have a forward available. David Knight fell off a ladder so could be out for a few weeks, Lewis Manor is injured and Simon Thomas is cup tied.

We don’t have a game this weekend so we have time to recover and we will put in some much-needed training work to prepare for the next phase of the season.

There is a change in the weather which will lead to a change in the quality of pitches and this period requires a mental strength that not all players have. Turning up for pre-season and the early weeks is something different to playing in the run up to Christmas.

I will finish talking about Tom Hine. The season before last he had his illness and he came back on the last day of the season. At the beginning of last season he was getting back to where he was before he did his ACL against Haringey in the FA Cup last year.

If you want to talk about mental strength, he has it in abundance. To come back twice and have that appetite to be involved when it would be so much easier to throw the towel in speaks volumes of him.