WITHAM Town’s management team aren’t going to allow their side’s recent upturn in form to take their focus away from the job in hand at the Village Glass Stadium.

Town are due to return to action on Saturday after a two-week break as they host Grays Athletic in an all-Essex Bostik League division north derby.

They are then back at home on Tuesday when Soham Town Rangers will be the visitors and the Witham players will head into the games with confidence after going unbeaten in their last five outings.

The most recent of those came as they beat Cheshunt 3-2 two weeks ago and continued a stunning turn around in fortune after they ended a 12-game sequence without a win in all competitions.

Witham’s recent form has now seen them take 13 points from a possible 15 to climb back into the upper end of the division north table.

They can now turn their thoughts to staying there and building rather than looking over their shoulders at the relegation battle, however, assistant manager James Robinson said no targets are being set - especially of putting pressure on to finish in the play-off places - as they focus on one game at a time.

Robinson said: “We’ll look at the top ten, but to be honest, we just have to keep going and not look at targets.

“You can’t think of it like that – not at the moment.

“If we go into early February and we’re not far off it, then that would be nice but it’s going to be tough.

“We just have to make sure that we compete in every game.

“It doesn’t matter who we are playing, whether it’s the leaders or whoever, we should be looking to every game now or at least compete.

“We should be putting our stamp on every game.

“We will lose a few, we’ll draw a few and we’ll win a few, but we can’t be sitting here at this time thinking ‘we’re going for the play-offs’. We’re still very much a work in progress. We are not the finished article so we have to keep working with the players and we’ll see where it takes us.”

Witham manager Adam Flint agrees that it’s not the time for grand statements of intent, but he does feel his team are now in the place they need to be to press on.

“At the start of the season, I just said I wanted us to be doing better than we did last season,” added Flint.

“We got 59 points then and we want to break that 60 barrier.

“We’re on 23 now and it seems a long way off still, but we just have to keep working on it.

“We are competitive now.

“We’ve come through a tough patch and it shows what we’ve got.

“You learn a lot from periods like that as I’ve never been through anything like that as a manager.

“But the players that we have now are a proper team.

“They work hard and we have no problems with them as they are all competing for places with good depth.”