There are few things certain in life, apart from taxes, death and of course Oldham Athletic raising fans’ hopes and expectations only to disappoint us with another poor display.

The same cycle feels like it repeats itself regularly, and seems to have done for the last 30 years or so.

This time it was away at Ebbsfleet United where the only positives were the point gained and the clean sheet, with thanks for both due to the excellent goalkeeping of Mat Hudson, once more.

He really has been the key man in a number of our positive results this season and deserves the plaudits that come his way for that.

Going forward we were toothless with a distinct lack of creativity, making it more bizarre that we didn’t get Tom Conlon more on the ball, especially after his excellent debut against Barnet when he showed he can be a real catalyst for us.

It was a second game in a row where we didn’t really look like scoring, although James Norwood could have done better with a one-on-one in the first half and he was unfortunate to injure himself in a similar opportunity in the second.

He will be a real miss for us in the coming games if his hamstring injury turns out to be as bad as it looked.

All weekend, it was really difficult to remember the recent positives, including the better performances and results in the league which had catapulted us into the play-offs. But I keep reminding myself that we do need to realise we are still in a strong position with plenty of games yet to go.

One of those will be hosting Phil Brown and his resurgent Kidderminster Harriers on 24 February and, as I write, it’s just been announced that this will be Frank Rothwell’s homecoming game after his epic solo journey rowing across the Atlantic Ocean, which he will hopefully complete in the next week or so.

The £1 ticket price will hopefully entice a bumper crowd to Boundary Park, to not only give him a very well-deserved hero’s welcome home, but to raise even more money for his chosen charity of Alzheimer’s Research UK.

I look forward to seeing lots of you there!

By then, we’ll have hopefully got some more points on the board. After our weekend off coming up, we embark on a six games in three weeks spell, looking to build the required consistency in both performance and result to get us back on track and back into the top seven.