Town boss Kieran McKenna says he’s still not spending too much time looking at the League One table or setting points tallies, despite the Blues being six points away from the play-offs following Tuesday’s 1-0 win at Doncaster with 15 games left to play.
McKenna was asked whether Saturday’s trip to the MK Dons, who are third, is a test of his ninth-placed side’s promotion credentials but he says he’s not looking at it in those terms.
"For me it’s three points, to be honest,” he insisted. "I still think there’s so much football to be played this season. We have so many games, we have so many games against the top teams.
"We desperately want to win the game, we’ve picked up a couple of wins in a row now, we want to make that three wins.
"But I’ve not spent too much time, as I’ve said all along, looking at the league table and positions and how many points we are ahead or behind teams.
"I still think there’s plenty of time for that further down the road. It’s a game that we desperately want to win, we’ll give everything to win and if we do it’ll be three points and it’ll be a step further towards our objectives.
"But if we don’t win, there’s plenty of football left and plenty of games left to play against the teams below us, but also the teams above us.
"So, it’s good if people are getting excited, we want the fans to be optimistic and we want them to be excited, but for us it really is a case of one game at a time trying to pick up as many results as we can.
"As I’ve said all along, we were a long way behind, we’ve still got a lot of ground to make up, so it doesn’t make any sense at this point to start worrying about league positions or points total, it’s one game at a time. We won on Tuesday, now we give everything we can to win again on Saturday.”
Regardless of totals going forward, McKenna has to be pleased with the 18 points from the 24 available, six wins out of eight matches, since he took charge in mid-December.
Given those results, are the Blues in a better position than he expected at this point? "I’m happy with the games that we’ve won, and there have been some good performances as well, some we could improve on, but some good performances. Happy with the development of the team, happy with the development of individuals.
"We know we’re not going to win every game but still very often as managers of coaching staff it’s the ones that get away that sit with you a little bit more rather than dwelling on the victories.
"We’re just looking at where we can get better. Trying to get better when we win, trying to get better when we don’t win.
"I think we’ve performed to a pretty good level over the last seven weeks now, but there’s lots of scope for improvement, we’re still at the very early stages of what we want to do and we just want to keep picking up as many results as we can while we’re working hard to improve performances and improve the style of play.”
The Blues have been accumulating 2.25 points per game since he took over, which, if maintained, ought to be enough to see them into the play-offs.
"Honestly, I’m not worrying too much about points totals, I know people will do You won’t be able to get me on that!” he laughed.
"For me, as I’ve said all along, we were so far behind, I think it’s time to take things one game at a time.
"I’ve barely mentioned to the players that we need this many points to get promoted or this many points to get the play-offs or anything like that, it’s just go at every game as well as we can with the right attitude and let’s see where we’re in a month or two’s time.”