Team captain Danny Grainger came away from The Lamex Stadium on Saturday afternoon feeling disappointed that his side hadn’t taken all three points having created the better of the chances on the day.
Speaking shortly after full time, he said: “Keeping a clean sheet obviously shows that we’re getting more solid, and we have been hard to break down, at times recently. Moving forward we now need to put it right at the other end of the pitch as well.
“We’re pleased with the clean sheet, of course we are, but I think if we’ve got aspirations for where we want go then these are the sorts of places where you have to come and pick up maximum points.
“I thought we could have nicked it towards the end and, overall, when you look back at it, we probably came away feeling a little bit disappointed.”
“The better of the openings fell our way, so it is an opportunity missed,” he insisted. “Their keeper had a lot more to do than ours and we limited them to very few chances.
“They’re good going forward, with the likes of Newton and Godden, Kennedy and Pett, but we thought we dealt with that and we caused them problems going the other way.”
With the gap to the play-off places stuck at a stubborn nine points, he commented: “We’re at the business end of the season now so we can’t keep looking at the gap and thinking it’s still the same.
“We’ve got to be coming away and thinking that we’ve gained a bit of ground if we really do have the aspiration to get up there.”
And on the need to add more goals to the performances to help to see victories over the line, he told us: “I’ve said this before, but we don’t defend as a back five, or as a back six when you include Jack [Bonham], and we don’t just score as a front two, or whatever.
“We do it all as a team so if we don’t score we don’t just blame the strikers and, likewise, if we concede we can’t just lay all of the blame on the defenders. We’re in it as a unit together so we just need to make sure we start picking up points.”
Heading into the weekend meeting with Forest Green United have 18 games left of the current campaign, with the dressing room determined to leave smiles on faces.
“We need to finish the season well,” Grainger said. “When you look at last season, going out in the semi-final of the play-offs gave us a taste for it.
“We want to get out of this league and that’s why we need to put things right at both ends of the pitch.
“It’s back home for next week and we’ve said all along that you have to win your home games. We go into every game expecting to win it and we back ourselves to achieve that.
“We need to make sure that we keep on an even keel and keep trying to chip away at getting up into those top places.”
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