Coventry City's Christmas period

Being out of the country over the festive period, an opportunity that I grabbed with abundant alacrity so as to avoid allowing what I thought would be a painful series of defeats for the City ruining my Christmas, I was unable to follow the Sky Blues as closely as usual.

When the news of our victory over Bristol City found its way to me I initially put the result down to a fortunate stroke of serendipity, however reading various match reports quickly led to a change of view.

We had won AND we were the better side; an extremely refreshing change to what has become the usual course of events on a given Saturday afternoon.

Upon discovering that we'd gone on to beat Brighton too I was just about ready to return home and bask in the glory of our mini-renaissance. Finally we were getting the points that our performances deserved.

One hopes that our last two fixtures represent only a temporary blip in what really has to be a prolonged run of good results if we're to get ourselves out of the squalid position in which we currently linger.

Time is certainly running out, and had we not recorded the aforementioned Christmas wins then it's fair to say that we could be all but condemned to relegation by now. The challenge now lies in regaining any momentum that may remain from our six-point haul and using it to come out of our trip to Pride Park with something to shout about.

Of course any hopes of survival depend massively on our ability to cling on to or (most likely) properly replace Lukas Jutkiewicz. The striker has done a good job so far of single-handedly keeping our survival dreams alive, and without him our outlook will be significantly bleaker.

Long gone are the January's where we could excitedly scour the internet in search of rumoured Sky Blue transfer targets. Now the month is spent crossing fingers and toes in the hope that we can keep possession of our few star players.

However the next three weeks pan out, one thing is for sure; we'll be in a much better position to judge our survival chances come February.