SATURDAY was a disappointing draw -- again --and when you look at the fixture list we would have earmarked Halesowen, Ilkeston and Weymouth for maximum points.

The fact we are so upset at not picking up three points at the Wessex Stadium is a measure of how far we've come.

Of course the lack of goals is worrying and it has surprised me because at the beginning of the season that wasn't something I'd thought we would have a problem with.

But there have been pluses notably our defence which hand on heart I did not expect to be so tight. It's a bizarre situation all round really when you think about it because there are not many clubs that have scored less, nobody has conceded less but we've still got the leading scorer in the league in Darren Middleton.

We have options to try and break our goal drought but we don't want to lose our heads, we must be sensible about it which has been our approach all the way through.

I think we have always been realistic in our assessment of games and taken an honest, hardworking approaching to turning this club around.

Certain individuals come in for criticism from time to time but there isn't one player in that dressing room that doesn't want to do well for the club.

What is frustrating is that as tight as this league is we had the chance to open up a gap but we missed that opportunity so all we can do now is concentrate on getting three points from the Hastings United game.

I've been in charge three years now and it has absolutely flown by.

I think anybody who has been at this club as a player and has a good time maintains a special bond with the place.

That certainly happened to me following my dream move to Everton and what often goes around comes around and when the opportunity came to manage the club I jumped at it.

Because City was the club that I left to join The Toffees I've always considered Worcester my club though it was a hugely different place to the one I left in 1978.

The day I left I felt Nobby Clark's team was going to win the league that year, and they did, but when I came back in 1999 the situation could not have been more different with Graham Allner's side struggling at the bottom of the league beneath it.

However I had no doubts about coming back though I remember driving back to Derby after my second game in charge at Halesowen, which we lost, and thinking to myself 'you've bitten off something here Barton!'

It's only after a period of time that you can look back and see what a plight the club was actually in.

Now of course we are challenging near the top and that's a position we hoped to be in but it's taken every second of those three years and there is still plenty of work to do.