LOOKING back, it has been a fine season for Worcester City and finishing seventh in Blue Square Bet North was beyond what most people expected.

Personally, I felt that mid-table was a realistic aim for us and was an achieveable goal.

Deep down, that was probably our target because a gradual improvement is all we can really hope for.

But all the way through August and up to the autumn we were in a solid position in the table and were quite consistent. We were always well-placed during the first quarter of the season after a reasonable start.

The disappointing thing, and the lowest point of the campaign, was getting knocked out of the FA Cup at Godalming in October. You can accept losing a league game because you have got 41 others to compensate for it but in the FA Cup it’s one game and you have got to wait another 12 months for another opportunity.

There are shocks every year in the competition and that was one which hurt me, Matt Gardiner and the players.

Although that was frustrating, it was the only low point of the first part of the season.

I felt, leading up to Christmas and following the Boxing Day victory over Gloucester City, we were still in a good position. We had blips, where we took heavy defeats at Guiseley and Altrincham, but we bounced back pretty quickly afterwards. Winning at Blyth the week after the Godalming loss is an example of that.

Moving into the new year, we had a shocking January. It was our worst month of the season by some distance but the boys remained positive and never let their heads drop.

Most clubs will have a bad month and we believed we would come out of it and from February until the end of the season, the results we had were superb.

We made some personnel changes early in the year to keep our top-half position, bringing in the likes of Tyler Weir, Stuart Whitehead and Greg Mills, and that worked.

It makes you wonder what might have happened had we had those players from the start of the season but, hopefully, they will be our players next season and we can hit the ground running.

The issue we might have is that when you bring in a player and they do well, they want rewarding.

Given that we are working on the same budget, we don’t want to use resources as an excuse, we want to look for a way around that.

You can look at the what-ifs but every manager can do that.

That said, a few strange things happened during the campaign, like being beaten 2-1 at Halifax when we deserved to win the game but it contrived to go against us.

Overall, we have had a great season and are really pleased with it but myself and my assistant Matt Gardiner are ambitious and, as much as seventh is seen as very good, we are looking at going higher.

How successful can we be?