Aaron Drinan said that Swindon Town must take confidence from having been able to go toe to toe with some of League Two’s best.

In the last two weeks, Town have twice gone away to a side top of the table at the start of play and were able to earn a draw at Stockport County and pushed Mansfield Town right to the final whistle.

Drinan said that even if the result had not gone their way at the One Call Stadium, the way Swindon had battled proved that they were not too far away.

He said: “It is frustrating when you come to the three away games that are all in the top seven and you are going toe to toe with them and creating chances.

“Maybe that is a thing where we look for next season, but there are still nine games left this year, so you can’t be thinking about next year.

“But it definitely should bring confidence that we can come to these places and play teams who are competing to go up to League One.

“We just need to be a little bit more intelligent when we are creating chances and we do go ahead or we do pull one back because, in places like Mansfield where the crowd can get behind their team if you take the sting out of the game and stuff like that, it is probably what we need to do a bit more.

“It should definitely be a confidence booster for us, maybe not result-wise but performance-wise, you are competing with the teams who are at the top of the table.”

Drinan added that now that they have shown that they can compete in these kinds of games, they need to focus on getting the results to go along with that.

He said: “Since I have been here we have had Stockport away and we hung in there and they were top, today it was probably our own doing and again they are top of the table, and then we played Gillingham.

“They are all teams in the top seven and we were more than capable of taking three points from those games, but it wasn’t meant to be.

“The resilience is there away from home and also the last home game was a draw, so I think we need to be picking up three points on Tuesday night at home.”