Disappointing as it was not to beat York City on Saturday, having led from the eighth minute until the 82nd, I thought we did okay.
David Wheeler's early goal gave us just the start we wanted but, unfortunately, we couldn't add a second and the visitors nicked a point when we failed to deal as well as we should have done with a late corner.
Of course, you want to win your home games and, inevitably, people will look at the League Two table and say York are the sort of side we ought to be beating at St James's Park but, at the same time, Nigel Worthington's team are unbeaten in their last 21 League Two games – a run stretching back to the end of January – so we're not going to get too downhearted about it.
What's more, there were a number of positives to take out of the game. Firstly, Matt Oakley disproved the theory you can't teach an old dog new tricks by producing a man-of-the-match performance in the heart of defence. Matt, who also provided the assist for David Wheeler's goal, looked as if he'd spent his entire career playing at the back. That aside, where has he been hiding that long throw all these years?
And I can't help thinking that anyone who was seeing striker Graham Cummins in action for the first time would have gone away enthused. Clearly, it's going to be a week or two before Graham is completely up to speed, but he put in a real shift. The more I see of him the more convinced I am that he's going to be a real asset for us between now and the end of the season.
On the subject of new signings, it's great that Christian Ribeiro has finally put pen to paper.
As you'll be aware, Christian has been training with us for some time and played in a number of the pre-season fixtures but it's only in the last week that the club was in a position to offer him a contract.
It's just our luck that Christian won't be available for a short while yet, as he completes his recuperation from a groin injury, but he's a full Welsh international who can play as a centre-half or full-back. And, like Cummins, he is a great lad who will I'm sure prove a valuable addition to the squad.
The ice bucket challenge has been all the rage over recent weeks and we felt obliged to give it a go and, at the same time, raise awareness of a good cause – in our case Jessica's Sarcoma Awareness.
Jessica Robson was a young woman who passed away in May, after bravely battling a very rare from of cancer for almost four years.
Since then her family have been raising cash for a number of charities. It would be fantastic if anyone reading this would like to go to their web page at www.gofundme.com/9jjtcs and boost their fundraising appeal.
You'll find a video of our efforts, which involved pretty much the entire squad, on the club's YouTube channel. Watch closely and you'll see Danny Butterfield comes close to missing when attempting the seemingly straight-forward task of tipping a bucket of water over his own head – no wonder Danny has failed to find the back of the net since he joined us in September of last year.
We travel to Northampton on Saturday in search of our first win of the campaign.
Chris Wilder did a fantastic job to keep the Cobblers up last season and the early indications are that they're going to be competing at the right end of League Two this time around. They might have crashed out of the League Cup at Bournemouth on Tuesday night, but a 3-2 victory away at Wolves in the previous round suggests they're a pretty decent outfit.
Be that as it may, we believe that on our day we're more than capable of beating any side in this division and if we perform to the best of our ability it's not beyond the realms of possibility that we can return from Sixfields with all three points.
For sure, while it would be great to win, we've just got to keep on eking out results where we can and with back-to-back home games against Mansfield and Oxford to follow, a draw wouldn't be the end of the world.
I see Northampton have got a couple of former Grecian loanees in their squad – winger Chris Hackett, who played five times for us in at the end of 2011, and Lawson D'Ath, who made seven appearances for us in 2013. I got on well with Lawson and while it will be good to see him again, it goes without saying, I hope he has a thoroughly miserable afternoon on Saturday.
For me, I'm hoping I can celebrate the birth of Sercs Jnr with our first three points of the season! He finally came into the world this week, a week after his due date, and it was the proudest moment of my life by far.
