Blues manager Kieran McKenna is looking for his side to get their season off to a good start but while providing “a big boost”, he knows it wouldn’t guarantee a successful campaign.
Town’s 2021/22 season got off to a very slow beginning with Paul Cook's Blues not managing a win until the 1-0 success away at Lincoln on September 18th, their seventh league game.
McKenna is after his side getting off to a much more positive start this time around, although knows that in their first two League One campaigns Town got off an running quickly before fading badly.
"It would be a big boost, it would be a big boost to everyone,” he said when asked about the importance of a good start.
"It would maintain the positive momentum that we have at the moment inside and around the football club.
"But it doesn’t guarantee anything if you get a good start. In the previous seasons that the club has been in League One, it’s had a really good starts and then fallen away.
"There’s no secret recipe. Rotherham last year had a really good first half of the season and had a dip in the second. Other teams, the year before Blackpool came with a really late run in the second half of the season.
"There’s no magic recipe, I think it’s about having the right foundations in place, having the right culture and ethos in your group that is going to allow you to be successful over 46 games.
"There’s a random element to football in any given game or any given two or three-game sequence but over the course of the season I think you probably end up where you deserve to end up and it’s about the fundamentals that you have within your group and within your club, and that’s what we’ve tried to build over the course of the season.
"I think it gives us a good chance of fast start but more importantly the focus has been around building the blocks for a 46-game league campaign.”
Expectation of a successful season and a return to League One is very high going into the Blues' fourth season in the third tier but McKenna says that doesn’t concern him particularly.
"It doesn’t come into my thinking too much, to be honest,” he said. "It’s just not one of my core beliefs. I know there’s expectation, that’s good, that’s positive because it means that people are positive about what the club are doing and hopefully positive about some things they saw in the second half of last season and positive about what we’ve done in the off-season.
"But expectation, pressure, having the big support, fanbase, interest, all of those things, I’ve said before, it doesn’t help you win football games.
"It’s not really critical to my thinking, our thinking is just on preparing the team as well as we can for each game and just enjoying the journey as we go along.
"We want to have success, we all want to bring this club forward but it’s important that we enjoy the journey as well.
"We can only control what we can control and I plan with the staff and hopefully the team, go into the season with a positive mindset and enjoy all those challenges ahead.”
Town and tomorrow’s opponents Bolton are among those expected to be in the promotion shake-up come May but McKenna wouldn’t be drawn into discussing who he believes will be the teams to beat.
"I think we have to respect everyone,” he said. "There are seven teams who finished above us in the league who are still in the league and there are three times who have come down from the division above, and one of those teams [Derby] only came down because they had a severe points deduction.
"So straight away there are 10 teams who accumulated more points than us last year and there are other big clubs in the league like Charlton, who finished below us.
"For me, I’m not interested in worrying about one team or another team, I know it’s a very strong division, I know there are a lot of very good teams, but we need to focus on ourselves, pick up as many wins as we can and accumulate as many points as we can and then we’ll see where we’re at in the later stages of the season.”