I’M sure nobody is getting carried away, but since the progressive move of appointing Paul Lambert, more progress has been made, all with a confident stride.

The return of Doneil Henry, the rejection of a derisory bid for Marcus Olsson and, not least, an away win.

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We could – returning to the theme of ‘luck’ once more – draw parallels between the penalty (and sending off) that was given against Adam Henley, and cost us so dearly at Milton Keynes, and the somewhat fortunate one that wasn’t and saved us two points on Saturday.

But let’s not, eh? Let’s look forward and put the recent past away.

That very thought was at the forefront of my mind this weekend as I recalled the passage in Living On The Volcano, a fine book by Michael Calvin on the subject of football management.

In it Alan Irvine recalls the moment where a certain Derek Shaw sacked him and Rob Kelly from Preston over the Christmas period of 2009 with the words, ‘I can’t give you any reasons, but we are going to move on’.

Obviously no hard feelings remain which is to Irvine (and Kelly’s) credit.

As Paul Lambert is an experienced boss he has obviously seen very early in his tenure what needed changing not only on, but also off the training pitch.

He appears to possess a twinkling charisma and have an easy way with media and fans – something not even Gary Bowyer’s most fervent admirers could say of him – and the new manager immediately commenced a charm-offensive with us fans, telling us just what most of us wanted to hear, and he got an immediate response.

To entice a decent home crowd and get the support built back up will perhaps take a little longer than a week or two, but every single fan at Deepdale met the team, manager and each other halfway.

The united Rovers support was immense and, where once the goal to reduce the arrears would have flattened the atmosphere, here it merely dampened down the raging fire a little.

I spoke last week about the need for the collective team to be more than the sum of their parts. Well, we saw on Saturday that our tremendous support can be the catalyst to that ‘extra’ man.

As at Anfield last season, our noisy supporters made the home fans sound like Enya competing against The Who, and contributed to the result.

Our positivity and patience can help make the second half of this season one to remember.