Neil Marshall column: Thank you for all the kind messages

Some people knew, but quite a lot didn’t, about my health battle and it was a tough decision to reveal it all in the paper last week and announce I was going to retire at the end of the season.

Once the news came out I got a lot of touching messages from all kinds of different people.

It would be nice to respond to them all in person but that might be tough. I’m grateful for all of them though and really appreciate the messages I’ve received.

I even had players from Droylsden coming up to me on Saturday wishing me all the best for the future at the end of the game.

Back to the football, and the draw at the weekend was a decent point in that we didn’t lose.

We didn’t play as we have done in recent games, having won our last five matches.

Credit to Droylsden though, they were a good side who knocked the ball around nicely.

Because it was one of our off days it was good to just keep our unbeaten run going, now seven games, and keep the momentum going.

The result on Saturday saw us drop out of the play-offs but we can gain some ground up on the top five against Glossop North End on Saturday.

They’ve done well this season and are third in the table so we know what we’ll be up against.

We’ll go there confident though and know a decent result will get us even closer to where we want to be.

It has all the makings of a good game and we’ll hope to continue our habit of enjoying playing away from home.

We won our last away game 3-1 at another play-off contender in Ossett Albion so will be hoping for more of the same.

I’ve said it before but playing away does seem to suit us with the pace in our team.

Quite often its easier to counter attack than break teams down at home and here’s hoping that’s the case again on Saturday.