Goalkeeper Tomas Holy admits he can hardly believe the difference between the Town team unbeaten so far this season and the one that performed so below par last term.
Holy, 28, started 21 of the club’s 36 league games in the 2019-20 campaign — on-loan Wolves keeper Will Norris was between the sticks in the other 15 — that was curtailed because of the coronavirus pandemic and saw final positions determined on a points-per-game basis.
Town, early-season leaders and again in pole position in January, eventually finished 11th after winning just one of their last nine league games, a run in stark contrast to how they have started this time around, when 10 points from their opening four league games sees them sitting third in the table.
Holy said: "It has been absolutely incredible and when you include Bristol Rovers in the Carabao Cup and Arsenal U21 in the EFL Trophy I would say it’s all six games.
"I don’t know what has happened because I saw the last pre-season game at Cambridge and thought ‘Okay, hopefully it is going to be fine’.
"But in the Bristol cup game we were like a different team and I was thinking ‘Alright, this might work’.
"But since the Bristol game we have played football which, in my opinion, has been promotion football because it has been absolutely incredible what the boys have done. I don’t even know what else I can say.”
After three consecutive clean sheets against Wigan, Bristol Rovers and Rochdale — all 2-0 wins — Holy conceded his first goal of the season in last week’s 1-1 draw at MK Dons and admitted it was a huge disappointment when Scottish midfielder Daniel Harvie equalised nine minutes into the second half to cancel out Jon Nolan’s early opener for the Blues.
Holy added: "It’s always disappointing for me to concede a goal and it doesn’t really matter when it goes in. It would have been the same feeling if I had conceded one on the first day of the season.
"But at the end of the day I will take the point because it was a really, really difficult game for us and especially in the last 25 minutes or so when we only had 10 men after Flynn [Downes] was injured and had to come off.
"But, like I always say, I try to find positive stuff in negative things and it was a great lesson for us.
"We watched the game back and saw what we should have done, what we did wrong and what we did right. Now we have to try to build on it, but I will take the point all day long.”
Town head north to face Blackpool in a rearranged game tomorrow, with Holy hoping to retain his place in Paul Lambert’s starting line-up and continue his ever-present run, and he was happy to win the duel with new signing David Cornell, signed on a free transfer after his contract at Northampton expired and he expressed a desire to move on.
He said: "To be honest I didn’t have any chats with the manager about it but I did speak to Jimmy [Walker, goalkeeping coach] during pre-season training because I want to be goalkeeper number one and thank God it came through.
"Now it is all about keeping the spot because Dai [Cornell] is real competition for me and to be honest I want to beat him.
"Would I have been disappointed not to start the season as number one choice? Of course I would but it is still the gaffer’s decision and if he had decided Dai was going to be the number one I would have had to accept it. I would have had to work even harder to prove myself and show that I should be starting.
"Like I said, seriously, he is great competition for me. In my opinion he is not only a great guy but also a high-quality goalkeeper and I like his style.
"We push each other in training and when I see how hard he is working I am telling myself ‘No, no, no, I want to be working harder’ and I raise my level of work in training.
"But after we finish we are both smiling and thinking ‘Yes, that was a proper session!’. I really like him as a person and also as a goalkeeper. I want to be better than him but he wants to be better than me, so that’s it.”