BRAINTREE Town Reserves joint manager Lee Fisher feels his team’s 3-1 win at Halstead Town on Tuesday highlights the strides that they have taken over the last year.

It was almost 12 months to the day that the Young Irons lost 7-0 to their local rivals in the second round of the Thurlow Nunn League Division One Knockout Cup, but, inspired by a Reece Grant hat-trick, they turned that around at the same stage of this year’s competition.

And Fisher, whose team return to Thurlow Nunn League division one action against Swaffham Town at the IronmongeryDirect Stadium on Saturday (kick-off 3pm) believes it highlights how his players are progressing and now pushing closer towards first-team involvement.

“It’s been massive progress over the last year,” he said. “We haven’t changed that many players, but it’s the way that the players are buying into what we are trying to do.

“We are trying to educate them and they now have a year of experience playing at this level of football.

“That helps massively, but their desire and commitment is completely different from this time last year.

“Even looking at our league form – this time last year we were on 12 points and we are now on 20 points so there’s the difference.

“The players now see they can move on with Braintree Town.

“Someone like Lewis Stantiall, he played left wing-back for us at Halstead, but he’s been training with the first team and I know Brad (Quinton) likes the look of him.

“He only had his first start with us two weeks ago, so to go from that to being asked to train with the first team and he then scoring for us on Saturday, it’s been amazing. The players now see that they have something to aspire to and that’s the big thing.”

It was an entertaining game at Halstead between two sides committed to playing a fast-paced flowing game, but Fisher was glad to have three players from the Iron’s first-team squad to bolster his stretched resources.

He added: “We started a bit slowly but once we got our passing game going, we did well.

“It helped having Matt (Baxter), Marcel (Barrington) and Reece (Grant) and if we hadn’t had them, we’d have struggled to fill the team because we had lost players in the previous two games through injuries.

“We had Charlie Webb and Harry Aldridge out from the Essex Senior Cup game and Joe Jones came off at the weekend at Wisbech and Troy Featherstone then broke his hand.

“So we knew it wouldn’t be easy.

“We said to the lads that it had been a good game against Halstead at our place and we knew it had been at a good tempo so we would have to be disciplined and committed.

“And we got that, certainly in the first half.

“We moved the ball quickly and they couldn’t cope with that.

“The penalty save by Lewis Hawley gave us a little wake-up call, but after that, you could see the momentum go our way and Halstead were pinned back a lot.”

Braintree now return to division one action with the visit of Swaffham on Saturday.

Fisher feels his team will be on a high after the win at Halstead and they can get back to winning ways in the league after being disappointed to lose 3-2 at Wisbech St Mary - only their second defeat in their last nine league games - last weekend.

“We will be flying after the game against Halstead,” added Fisher.

“Everyone was disappointed on Saturday after Wisbech but we’re very happy with how we did at Halstead and we’re now back at home where we’re unbeaten.

“We have a big pitch there, which teams don’t expect but the way we play at home with a high tempo, we’ll be looking for the three points.”