SWINDON captain Mike Thompson has labelled this weekend’s game against Banbury as a “must-win” for his side.

Swindon, who currently sit in 10th place in the South West One East table, go into the game having been narrowly beaten 34-31 away at Windsor last time out.

This weekend’s opponents are one league place above the home side and were 38-28 winners over Royal Wootton Bassett a week ago.

Despite this, Thompson can’t see any reason why Sean Lynn’s side can’t get back to winning ways in front of a home crowd.

“There’s not much separating us and Banbury at the moment. We need to get a win, we can’t really afford to get anything else,” said Thompson “We needed a win this week but we let it slip through our fingers, so we have to get one this weekend to get back on track.

“To go into the Christmas break on a positive note is what we want. We are so on and off at the moment it is a bit frustrating.”

Swindon’s stop-start season has been a growing frustration for Thompson, who admits the Greenbridge Road side need to put a run of results together.

“We go out and beat Bassett, who have been beating most teams, but then we go out and play the lower level teams and we are coming away with narrow losses where we should be picking up wins,” he added.

“The issue we have at the minute is we have a lot of players who are unavailable, it’s that time of the year where people have plans. We picked up another few injuries at the weekend too, which is not ideal.

“It’s frustrating as on Saturday we scored 21 points in 20 minutes. If we could do that for the whole game, we will blow teams away but we can’t seem to do it.”

If Swindon are to claim their fifth win of the season, they will have to do it without Troy Badenski and Josh Haynes who both picked up shoulder injuries at the weekend.