PIERCE SWEENEY IS THE CLUB CAPTAIN OF EXETER CITY FC

While it’s great that we have an FA Cup fourth round tie against two-times European champions Nottingham Forest to look forward to, it doesn’t disguise the fact that we need to start moving back up League One ASAP.

Unfortunately, print deadlines dictate that I’m writing this column ahead of our game against Peterborough on Tuesday night. (The match finished 1-1 - with City grabbing a 90th minute goal)

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Touch wood we’ll get something from our trip to Cambridgeshire, but regardless of the result at London Road, we’ll be targeting six points from the home games against Blackpool on Saturday and Leyton Orient on Tuesday evening.

Saturday’s 1-0 defeat at Birmingham was our third League One loss on the bounce, coming after 2-1 reverses away at Wycombe and at home to Bolton. We weren’t a million miles away from getting something in all three of those fixtures and if we can eek out just a little bit of improvement I see no reason why we can’t put a few wins together.

As I mentioned last week, I stayed with Jay Stansfield and his partner Charlotte ahead of the Birmingham game, and watched the match alongside Stano’s family. While it was a little strange to watch the game from behind enemy lines, so to speak, I think a fair few people in my vicinity also had a lot of affection for Exeter. Unfortunately, we didn’t create a great deal going forward, although we did succeed in frustrating the home side for large parts of the game.

When you consider the makeshift nature of our backline, which was missing the recently departed Tristan Crama, Johnly Yefko, who has now injured his other hamstring, not to mention myself, that’s some effort and had we not let our guard drop for a few seconds in injury time at the end of the first half I’d have fancied our chances of returning home with a hard-earned point against the league leaders.

I’m not a great watcher of games at the best of times so, as you might imagine, found the final stages of Saturday’s game especially hard going. It was frightening to see Vinny Harper on the floor for quite so long after an ugly-looking clash of heads with a Birmingham player in the 86th minute, and while we were still reeling from seeing Vinny stretchered from the field, Jack McMillan was sent off.

As you might imagine, it was a huge relief when doctors gave Vinny a clean bill of health and he was released from hospital the next day. Unfortunately, concussion protocols dictate he’ll miss our next couple of games but, mindful of how grim things had looked at one point on Saturday, that’s a very minor concern in the grand scheme of things.

As regards Jack, I thought he was very unlucky to receive his marching orders in the 13th minute of injury time. You’d like to think that officials might cut players a bit of slack when they’re out on their feet after 113 minutes – all the more so when they’ve just witnessed one of their teammates stretchered off the field prostrate – and not pull out a second yellow card for an ever-so-slightly-mistimed tackle.

For sure, if we continue to lose central defenders as we have done over the last few weeks, I fear the gaffer may have to do a David Perkins and dig out his boots!

Ultimately, while we performed well up to a point, there weren’t a whole load of positives to take from the day. That said, it was great to see almost 2,000 travelling Exeter fans at St Andrews and I know the players very much appreciated the support they received, and were only disappointed they weren’t able to reward the fans with a bit more to cheer.

While he was never our player and, that being the case, there was always a chance it might happen, I think everyone connected with the club was gutted when Brentford recalled Tristan Crama from his season-long loan at SJP last week. Tristan has been outstanding for us this season and I have little doubt had he remained, he would have been a leading contender for the club’s player-of-the-year award.

Wycombe were heavily linked with a move for Tristan. However, from the conversations I had with him, there was never any prospect of him joining the Chairboys – rather, if a move to the Championship hadn’t materialized, he would have very happily remained at Exeter.

As it is, the Frenchman has joined Millwall in a permanent transfer and I’ve little doubt he will be a huge hit there. Certainly, I’ll be keeping a close eye on how Tristan’s career develops and would be very surprised if we don’t see him playing in the Premier League at some stage in the next two to three years.

We’ve also bid a fond farewell to Mustapha Carayol and Amani Richards over the last seven days. Muzza joined us in September, when injuries to Demetri Mitchell, Pat Jones, and Yanic Wildschut left us desperately short of bodies in wide areas.

A great character, the former Middlesbrough man featured eight times for us, and I’m sure everyone at the Cliff Hill Training Ground wishes him. Muzza has a young child, who lives with his partner in London, so I suspect his next port of call might be a bit nearer the capital.

Amani’s loan spell has been a bit of rollercoaster – he looked lively on his debut at Bolton, and scored our winner at Leyton Orient, but has barely featured in recent weeks. While I suspect he will be a little bit disappointed with how it went, he shouldn’t be too downhearted. As I said too him a month or two ago, you just have to stick in there.

I think quite a few young players struggle when they’re first sent on loan, but if Amani can learn from the experience, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t go out on loan again in the second half of the season and play 20-odd games for a club somewhere.

In the meantime, we’re very much looking forward to the visits of Blackpool and Orient. We were a shade unfortunate to succumb to an injury time winner at Bloomfield Road back in September and, with Steve Bruce’s side having gone six League One games without a win, we will be looking to put the record straight at the weekend.

Conversely, Richie Wellens’ Orient team are in fine form at the minute – like us they’re into the fourth round of the FA Cup, and have won five and drawn one of their last six league games – so it ain’t gonna be easy on Tuesday night.

However, we beat the Os at Brisbane Road at the beginning of October and I’m backing us to repeat the feat under the floodlights at SJP!