BARNET come to Roots Hall tonight with a fairly decent away record.

They have done far better on the road than you would expect from a team in their position.

And having watched at least five of their games on DVD I know they haven’t been getting the score-lines their performances deserve.

They will therefore be dangerous opponents this evening and we will have to be very wary of their strikers.

Ben May is an experienced player and Izale McLeod is a top quality goalscorer.

He is the joint highest scorer in League Two this season and certainly knows where the back of the net is.

We, of course, had him on trial before the start of last year and I’ve always been a manager who makes a decision on a player at that moment in time.

Back then he wasn’t fit and wasn’t at his best.

But since then he’s got the fitness back he was lacking and gone on to score goals but that’s what happens in football sometimes.

I’m sure our defence will be looking forward to the challenge though after keeping clean sheets in three of our last four games.

That’s something which has certainly pleased me and something I want to keep going.

If I’m being honest I do see us finishing in the play-offs now, especially after the way the results went for our rivals in the week.

The games those sides have left aren’t the toughest either and you can’t really see them dropping the number of points we need them to so we can sneak in to third.

However, if we win this evening then that’s our place in the play-offs mathematically certain and after that we can really push on and see what happens.

Beating Barnet won’t be easy though and the players there will be wanted to impress the new manager, Martin Allen.

He will have them fired up and they will be desperate to win because of the position they’re in down towards the relegation zone.

But our aspirations are to get promotion and that will need to be carefully managed because if we do go on to make the play-off final then our season will be extended by an extra 21 days.

All of the other teams will already be away on holiday while we will be training hard.

And it’s something we have started to think about sorting out so that if it does happen we know exactly what we will be doing.

With that in mind it’s good that the likes of Luke Prosser, Ryan Leonard and Anto Flood are back in training.

Christian Dailly is only about a week away from returning and we will need all the options available to us during the run in to the season.