WITH just 13 games left of the season remaining and Swindon Town four points adrift of safety in League One, head coach Luke Williams admits that the pressure is growing.

With the prospect of another six-point clash with bottom-of-the-league Coventry City tomorrow, before hosting free-falling Gillingham on Tuesday and Chesterfield six days later, that weight of burden looks unlikely to ease any time soon.

However, Williams is trying not to let any cracks show on the surface for the sake of the team and is happy to shoulder the expectation from the fans in what will be a defining period in Town’s season.

“The pressure is building and it is our job to deal with that,” he said.

“You need to be resilient and that means that you have to, even when your own fans have turned on you, stay strong together because nobody else cares about you.

“You have to look inward at the changing room and stick strong together.

“Unfortunately, the truth is, if you cannot deal with the pressure then you can’t have a career in football.

“Much of the pressure is put on by yourself. It’s how you choose to deal with the levels of criticism and the knockings.

“If you allow it to make you feel negative and allow it to get on top of you then it will.

“If you don’t allow the negativity and the comments to get on top of you, then it shouldn’t have such a big effect.”

However, having seen his side put in a dominant performance against fellow strugglers Oldham Athletic at the weekend, Williams is keen to stick to a similar game plan and doesn’t expect predictability to be an issue.

“We outperformed every team in the division (last weekend), in terms of creating chances and stopping the opposition,” he added.

“It’s extremely frustrating to have not taken the points, but I would rather be drawing a game that I feel like we should have won, than drawing a game and feeling lucky.

“We have to try and be strong enough to impose ourselves on the opposition, even if they know what is coming.

“We have got the option of changing but we should be able to reproduce a similar performance.”