The complete focus for Paul Simpson and his staff and players was thrown towards this weekend’s game at Plough Lane almost immediately after the whistle had blown last Saturday.
But part of the process after any game is to look at the negatives and positives, and for any lessons to be learned.
“I can’t really say there’s been a lot of fallout from the Harrogate game, but there was obviously disappointment,” he said. “I think when I’ve looked back at it, it was exactly as I felt on the day.
“We did a lot of good things and I can’t fault the work rate we got from the players at all. They did what we would have wanted them to do, and we restricted a decent Harrogate team to no shots on goal.
“Barring that own goal, they didn’t trouble us, so we did some good things. We just lacked that extra bit of care and quality in the final third, and perhaps a little bit of finesse that would have helped us to find the right pass or finish.
“If that’s what you have you don’t win games of football, and sometimes you don’t get draws out of them. In that game we made the mistake, they didn’t, so we take it on the chin and move forward. The only thing we’re concentrating on this week is getting a good performance at Wimbledon.”
That response, as we have come to expect, is an example of the level-headed approach currently being employed along the corridors of Brunton Park.
“I’ve said it before, but I think you have to have that,” he told us. “Football seasons are never straightforward, they don’t go the way you would like them to all the time.
“We would all like to be where Orient are, or even where Stevenage are, but we’re not. There are only three teams that are going to go up, and four teams below that who will contest the play-offs, so we’ve just got to do what we can to make sure we’re part of those seven places.
“We’ve done really well for 29 games and the challenge now is to see if we can work as hard, or even harder, through the games we have left to play. We haven’t achieved anything yet, and I know that’s something I’ve been saying all season, but that is the way it is.
“You get judged over 46 games, or over a couple more if you’re involved in the play-offs, and you know that if you’re not in those top seven places that’s your season over. We’ve got to do everything we can to make sure we finish strongly so that we are part of that top group of teams.”
Only two league defeats at home is certainly a big tick in the box with that endgame in mind.
“To be successful you’ve got to do well at home and back that up with what you do away,” he said. “We’re so out on a limb here in the north that we have to make it really difficult for anyone who comes here.
“We know from our own experiences that we do a lot of travelling, but the flip side is that other teams have to travel a long way to get up here. We’ve got to make it really difficult, and that’s what we’ve done for the majority of the season.
“We didn’t make it difficult enough for Harrogate, and there were circumstances within the Orient game that affected that result, and there’s no point in going over that again.
“In general we’ve done well, and I think we’ve also done much better this season away from home than we did last year. We have to keep it all going.
“The next big game is away from home and then we can concentrate on the two home games that come after that.”
Being the division’s top scorers perhaps made the Harrogate home game more frustrating in the fact that the Blues never really looked like finding the back of the net.
“I have to be honest and say that I agree that we didn’t look like we were going to score on Saturday with the way the game went,” he admitted. “I had a conversation with Kris Dennis earlier in the week and I said to him that if we’d played on until next Tuesday we still wouldn’t have scored. It was just one of those days.
“Sometimes you can scrutinise these things too much and get screwed up about it too much, and all we have to consider is that we have consistently created good chances in the games we’ve played so far.
“We’ve scored goals from the chances we’ve made, but it just didn’t happen for us last weekend. We didn’t quite do the things we needed to do in the right way, and we didn’t do enough to earn a result.
“We did it really well against Barrow in the game before, so we have to keep doing what we’re doing and we’ll give ourselves a chance, whoever we play.”