The John Barton column

IT'S not all doom and gloom at St George's Lane by any stretch of the imagination -- despite the defeat at Folkestone and Monday's draw with Kettering Town.

It has been a particularly tough start to the season, which has already seen us travel to Margate for the pre-season opener, and in a calendar month we have visited Folkestone, Newport Isle of Wight, Merthyr Tydfil, played Weymouth and faced Kettering Town twice.

Most of these sides are at the top end of the table and it has been an especially tough start when you consider the fact we are still feeling the effects of an indifferent pre-season and the associated injuries.

All in all I think we have had a fairly satisfactory opening to the campaign to date, but I was disappointed by the performance against Kettering and I don't think we deserved to win the game.

I felt they looked a decent side and had spells where they put us under a lot of pressure and goalkeeper Paul Wyatt got us out of some difficult situations.

We had a chance when striker Phil Stant got down the right side and leading goalscorer Mark Owen was there for a tap-in that could have got us the win, but I've no complaints with the draw.

The disappointing aspect was that in the first-half we had time to get the ball down and attempt to pass it but fell into the trap of thumping it up field and it looked like a game of tennis at times.

Wyatt though was outstanding and as I have said before we are fortunate with him and Danny McDonnell to have two such good goalkeepers at the club and a lot of the credit goes to coach John Newman who has helped to develop them.

His contribution shows the benefits to the club of having staff to work on an individual basis with players.

Stant continues to do well for us and defy his age but we have been suffering from inconsistency and struggling in front of goal as we did against Folkestone.

Saturday's defeat was made more frustrating by the performance of the referee who played no stoppage time.

I think all anybody wants in the game is to see fair play but in some games a half can last an hour while on Saturday we finished with 40 minutes.

It was particularly annoying because, and I'm not saying we would have equalised, but I stopped my watch exactly when the ref stopped his and the linesman said there would be five minutes injury time but non was played.

Refereeing is a difficult job, one that I'm not sure I would want to do, especially with the number of rule changes.

We've got professional referees now but if they think they are going to cut out mistakes by suddenly switching to full time they are mistaken.

The introduction of the card system has also brought many problems and forces situations where just a bit of common sense should prevail.

JOHN BARTON was talking to soccer reporter NAT SYLVESTER.