On a lovely autumnal day, the blue skies gave everyone a lift as we headed for the Toughsheet in good spirits.

The Doombar deliberations were upbeat as we seem to have weathered our first major crisis of the season, winning our last three league matches and our performances improving, especially at Northampton.

All the thoughts were on making it four in a row against struggling Shrewsbury, who we had already beaten this season. What could possibly go wrong?

The Shrews deservedly went two up. A few well-chosen words were definitely needed at half time and were obviously delivered as we came out in the second half on fire.

Kyle Dempsey and Szarbolcs Schon soon had us level as we laid siege to their goal. Shrewsbury for their part, took game management to a new level, with players going down ‘injured’ and other time-wasting techniques.

But we couldn’t get the winner, and we had to settle for the draw. There were mixed feelings as we were glad that we had pulled it back but disappointed that we had not got all three points.

The passion is back in the team and the management but unfortunately the frustration is back as well with Ian Evatt receiving a red card for an incident after the final whistle.

So, now we go into the international break in mid table. Things are definitely looking better than they were a few weeks ago.

The break should help us get some more injured players back and hopefully we can look forward to steadily improving our performances and getting the results to take us up the league. It is still very early days with only nine games played but I feel we are heading in the right direction.

Strangely our away form is better than our home form at the moment, so maybe we still have work to do when the opposition comes and park the bus. But then again, it is doing all the hard work that will bring us success.

All of us, on and off the pitch are going to need a lot of patience, before we get there.