With two weeks to prepare for Accrington Stanley and Notts County, Swindon Town have won one point from a possible six. Has the impromptu break helped the team?

It’s always frustrating to have an enforced break when times are good. After a - let’s face it - fantastic start to Swindon’s campaign on the pitch, sitting out a weekend of action in mid-October due to Notts County’s international call ups was not the welcome break from the gruelling efforts of a league campaign such a pause to proceedings can otherwise prove when times aren’t so good.

To make matters worse, the immediate fruits of a two week break between games were not so sweet: a return to action up in Lancashire resulting in a chastening 4-0 loss against Accrington Stanley. With regret, after that loss, and last season’s dagger of a penalty shootout defeat which denied us an away trip to Anfield, the way milk was marketed in the 1980s feels increasingly unrelatable. They’ve left their mark.

Meanwhile, Tuesday’s point at home to Notts County is exactly the kind of game you could squeeze to fit any hypothesis: an optimist will point to a hard-fought draw with an in-form team as a positive, a pessimist may wonder why Swindon looked so laboured while level-pegging, only really clicking into gear when chasing a deficit.

It’s tempting to fret that, having failed to make immediate use of what, in theory, should have been a squad full of fresh legs after the break, the........

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