THIS is the worst slump I’ve known since I’ve been manager and sometimes you do struggle to know which way to go to address the balance.

When you get into a rut, it just makes things difficult but the players aren’t doing much wrong and we’ll work through because I’m sure there are other clubs in the same position. We’ll come through to the other side.

If you go this long without winning many games it will have an impact on where you finish, and where we wanted to finish five or six weeks ago. We have to rely on other teams to go through the same mini-slump.

We came away from home with the hope of not giving anything away and hopefully getting something through a little bit of creativity – as it happens, we’ve come unstuck again but that’s just the way it is.

If we were playing one of the top five teams on a good pitch, we’d come into our own.

Our Achilles’ heel this season has been the mid-table to bottom-half sides that graft and battle.

Preparations have gone well for Hitchin this weekend. The lads trained hard on Tuesday and again on Thursday night.

Most of them also went to the Cheltenham Festival together on Wednesday too.

We’re still assessing Greg Tindle because he broke his hand against Cirencester but it is out of the cast now.

Toby Osman’s got a slight hamstring strain, Nathan Rudge has a knee problem and Shaun Lamb’s serving the last game of his suspension.

Ross Stearn had been away in New York all week and was a bit jet-lagged before Redditch.

Richard Evans rang in the week and said that he cannot commit because his job’s changed and he’s moved further afield.

We hope that Hitchin will come to us and have a go like Hitchin sides of the past have done.

But they may try to frustrate us, so we have to be ready to show enough quality to break them down.