IT'S fair to say we've hit a bit of a plateau and the easy bit, in the bigger picture, was always taking the club from a bottom side to where we are now.

The difficult part, as we are finding, is the last push where we make ourselves into genuine challengers. We've got to get to another level and doing that is proving hard.

At present we are not getting the results we want and we've considered lots of options to try and improve things.

Ultimately we've got to work with what we've got and while people will say the current players are under performing, there is no doubt in my mind that year on year the players brought in, such as Leon Kelly and Barry Woolley, have improved the squad.

Now we have to get stuck in and start producing the kind of effort that we did at Dover.

While acknowledging that we are in a difficult run, there are two ways of going -- we can either get stuck in and look forward to the remaining challenge or keel over and go under -- there are no grey areas.

The first target is to make sure we are in the top 13 to qualify for the new Conference but that is not our only mission.

We want to improve year on year so that means trying to finish higher than the previous season.

Saturday's trip to Newport County is another testing match for us and the immediate task is to repeat the level of performance we showed at Dover.

If we can do that, and approach it in the same manner, we have an excellent chance of achieving a positive result.

And there is certainly enough scope for revenge against Newport who were better than us on the day when they beat us 5-1 though we did give generous help with the goals!

I've always been brought up not to be critical of officials because basically you are wasting your time but recent incidents have tried my patience to the limit and I believe cost us two points.

There's no doubt two decisions in the last two games have cost us and they were not even split decisions.

Against Stafford Paul Carty played a ball off a player to win a throw-in but the referee's assistant gave it the other way, and they've promptly crossed and scored.

Then at Dover a player heads in a goal from an offside position. It's frustrating but you can't be too critical of them because the FA will hit you with a fine if you complain.

However, something in general has to be done about the standard of officiating and the decision making process otherwise there is going to be big trouble and I say that because of what is at stake in this league with regard to next season.

Dover was hard enough for us because we only had 12 fit players but we made light of that to produce as good an away performance as we've seen all season.

Liam McDonald gave one of the most accomplished debuts I've seen in what was an intimidating fixture. I would emphasis it was a one off match because I don't want to set him up for a fall but he had real maturity to his game.

His display will have been a wake-up call to others and Liam can be really pleased with what's he's done.

We've got a couple of young players at the club that have come through the academy but we have to ease them in gently because it's a tough league to play in.

JOHN BARTON was talking to reporter NAT SYLVESTER.