SWINDON Town first-team coach Ross Embleton is hoping that a let up in the volume of fixtures in the second half of the season will have a positive impact on his side’s performances.

Between the start of the season and January, Town played 12 midweek fixtures, with players and staff alike only being afforded a full week’s preparation ahead of four games.

However, that constant flow of games is set to ease between now and the end of the season, with only a trip to Northampton and home games with Gillingham and Sheffield United given midweek billings, as well as the two games with AFC Wimbledon and Walsall over the four-day Easter period.

With Town having to manage a sizeable injury list for much of the first half of the season as well, Embleton is confident that both the extra recovery time and preparation period between games will have a good reflection in the side’s results.

“Now the turn of the year has come, the games programme isn’t set as drastically as it has been for us so far this season,” he said.

“You’d like to think recovery of injuries and the amount of games players miss won’t be as much as in the first half.

“The more experienced players have carried little issues and they’ve gone through different injuries.

“Someone like Nathan (Thompson) would need different things to speed up his recovery.

“It would be nice for everyone, after a game, to know how the week is going to look and the amount of training time that we have got in order to prepare for the next game.”

Having seen the positive immediate impact of Martin Ling’s arrival last season, it was this weekend last year that Swindon, under the temporary guidance of Luke Williams, began a run of just two defeats in 10 – form that secured Williams a five-year contract as head coach.

Embleton has put that partly down to the fixture list and hopes that, starting with Shrewsbury Town this weekend, his current squad can put together a similar run to pull them clear of the drop zone.

“The drastic change after Christmas that we found when there wasn’t so many Saturday-Tuesday games really helped us to prepare,” he said.

“We had two real good patches with two defeats in between.

“We had the period when Martin was here and we lost the two over Christmas and then we had another good run and we lost a couple.

“We then had a bit more a mixed bag and finished the season with a poor run, followed up with a good ending.

“That’s the sort of form we will be looking for to turn it around and get comfortable and higher up the league and then you can reassess where your season is going to finish.”