Coventry Sphinx manager Luke Hopkins has used the time of a couple of postponed games to review the season so far.
Hopkins told the Sphinx website; "This is probably quite a nice time to do a part review of the season, we are half way in league games played (21) as to date on Thursday 9th January and sitting seventh in the Midland Alliance League with 38 points.
"We’ve had a good FA Cup run beating Bewdley Town, Lye Town, Tividale, and crashing out at Southern Conference team Worcester City in the 3rd Qualifying round.
We had a disappointing run in the FA Vase but in our defence, there was not much we could do about a man wanting to jump off a bridge on the M42 who was there for over 24 hours, but we did beat Tividale again and Pelsall Villa to be knocked out by Westfields 6-1 in a delayed kick off and with no subs and key players still stuck in traffic!!
"So currently looking where we are seventh in the league and 38 points with games in hand bar Tividale above I think if we carry on the form we have had over the first half into the second half of the season we can maintain a top 6 finish - the same form would give us 76 points which would of been good enough to finish 4th last season which was 26 points more and 10 places higher than we did. So that is the target for the lads to perform too.
"I feel we have come a long way in 12 months - the squad has improved in strength depth and quality.
"We lost some good players in the summer and it’s good to see them doing well over in the states (Harry White, Kryan Johal and Liam McNally). We replaced them with good quality in the summer and we are scoring more and keeping more clean sheets than we did this time last year and the mistakes being made are reducing, although they will never go at this level of football.
"On a whole I think we have moved forward massively and hope we can continue the progress shown and not stand still.
"We’ve taken in players from the youth team (Ross Knight and Jackson Downie) and continuing to monitor the current under 16’s squad who had 5 lads turn out in a first team midseason friendly, so the future is once again looking good I think as we move forward.
"We are looking to add a couple of players to the squad - the right ones, players that will give us further options to what we have and fit in with the hard working mentality we have.
"Hopefully we get to play a game of football this year in January, with the weather looking bad this week for the coming Saturday (11th) and no fixture for the 18th its keeping the lads ticking over and hungry for a game is going to be key to the finishing position we get.
"Finally I personally would just like to thank all the management team that have been with me over the last 6 to 12 months, Lee Jon and Lynton ever present and Stuart and Shaun joining in the summer for this year. Also behind the scenes, Jackie and now Alan and Whitty when needed, its all a big team effort. Thank you once again, lets hope 2014 brings us success.