One of the offshoots of the truncated 2020/21 season is the fact that the January transfer window kicks in just 60 days after the summer window closed, and with the Blues in a strong league position it could well be that more business is on the cards as they look to cement their good first phase of the campaign.
“I believe you always have to try to keep pushing because if you don’t you find that you drop off,” manager Chris Beech said. “We’ll keep pushing, of course will, but we’ve made massive strides from where we were this time last year and we have to be understanding of that.
“Normally in football – particularly these days – it tends to be that if you want to make a significant difference you have to pay for it, so it’ll be a hard task for us. But I’ll keep looking and I’ll keep pushing our current lads, because all I want is for us to continue to improve.
“I wrote on our tactics board the other day that the biggest compliment you can pay to your players is to push them beyond their limits. If your attitude is that you don’t care about that, you can just let things slide, but that’s not how we are here.
“We want everyone to be the best they can be, then we want them to get better than that.”
But is there a danger that those players who are standing out will bring attention and offers that could see a fracturing of the current squad that will bring a wobble to the team spirit that has been so evident almost from the moment they got back together in the summer.
“The players who are playing well still have so much to learn, and I don’t think the time for them to move on is right as we speak now,” he told us. “I’m not saying that just to make my job easier, it’s how I feel about the group we have together right now.
“If there is interest then you deal with it. It was probably more difficult last January when our young defender was moving to the Premier League and Hallam Hope moved out for a fee at the same time.
“At that time I then had to try to find ways to keep us moving away from dropping out of the football league, so that was a real concern.
“The challenge this season is to stay consistent and keep moving forward. As I say, you generally have to pay a lot of money to do that, and there are no guarantees once you’ve paid that money that it’ll be successful.”