THERE’S nothing to match the excitement of an away trip.

Getting up early to rendezvous at the stadium for the long coach trip.

Meeting friends and looking forward to that full English breakfast on England’s motorway network. 

Finding interesting pubs, discovering new beers, chatting with the home fans and seeing the lads run out onto pastures new or fields we have not visited for a long time.

Sadly, we are not going to experience that for the foreseeable future as we are still confined to barracks under the latest lockdown.

All this away trip involved was switching on the iFollow.

Ian Evatt made two changes, bringing in Ali Crawford and Jak Hickman as he tries to find the right balance in the team.

For the most part, we held our own against Colchester, gave as good as we got but lost to two dreadful defensive errors, when we overdid the social distancing.

Most of the statistics were in our favour as we dominated possession. But the only statistic that matters is the scoreline.

It is about what you do with that possession. But we are a work in progress and there were signs of improvement and hopefully this will continue.

A lot of patience will be required from the fans. A little bit of perspective would not go amiss. Why the bookies made us favourites to be champions of League Two, I do not know.

We are at the very start of a long rebuilding and recovery of the club, both on and off the field. I am genuinely excited at the prospect of watching this project from the start, similar to the rebuilds we had in the 1970s and 1980s.

I look forward to a good team being built and becoming successful in what are unbelievably challenging times. This will take years.

Our first target has got to be to stop the slide after two successive relegations.

History is full of clubs that did not stop the slide like Notts County and clubs that came perilously close to the edge like Blackpool, Bournemouth, Brighton and Burnley.

We are two games into the new season, with no goals and no points so far. But that is no excuse for all the vitriolic abuse of the players and management, that erupted on social media after the game.

Let’s enjoy seeing how things develop and then we can proudly say that we were there at the beginning.