SWINDON Town must redirect the frustration of consecutive postponements to ensure they get off to the perfect start in 2013, according to Paolo Di Canio.

After seeing the Boxing Day clash at Leyton Orient and Saturday’s trip to Colchester called off because of waterlogged pitches, Town will hope to finally get their next dose of festive football when Portsmouth come to Wiltshire on New Year’s Day.

Di Canio has spoken of a “positive energy” at the County Ground in recent days, and he wants that to continue with victory over the struggling south coast outfit.

In order to do that, he has asked his players to maintain their focus in the wake of back to back cancellations.

“If we want to do something important now we have to cancel the frustration that has gone and concentrate on the next game,” said the Swindon boss.

“We will have a busy period but this period would be busy anyway.

“It’s not an excuse at all but there is a frustration for the moment.

“Now we have to cancel, forget and focus the attention.

“Obviously it wasn’t hard for my players to focus themselves the day before the game and then focus on the attention on the next game and then when we were nearly ready to travel the game was called off.

“I tried to get them to behave well because maybe they can think they have another four days, you never know.

“Not in terms of going out but in terms of switching off. I was very happy with the three days when we had a very hard session.

“You can be a bit down mentally but once again I persuaded them not to be stupid. In this moment, even if we have one or two games in hand, now we have to take the best we can in the next two games.

“We have two home games in front of a very good crowd against two difficult sides because they will come in here with a desire to get points, but we are in some way going to have more desire and more positive energy.

“I can’t imagine my players, after they’ve been working so hard for 11 days, not having the anger and the desire to play.

“I’m sure that we are going to have a very good performance.”