Here’s my column from last week’s Leader. It forms part of the paper’s comprehensive pre-match coverage every Friday, featuring interviews, an in-depth look at the opposition and lots of statistical analysis. All content in the column (c) www.leaderlive.co.uk.

The breathing space which the weather and Cambridge’s FA Trophy run has afforded us lately makes this an idea time to step back and take stock of our season so far.

The gut feeling of most Wrexham fans would boil down to two rather fundamental concerns: we’re conceding too many and not scoring enough at the other end. An analysis of the facts suggests that only one of those suppositions is actually true.

Although it feels a little surprising, we are in fact one of the division’s highest scorers. I suspect it feels like we’re not so prolific because two factors affect our perception of our attack.

Firstly, we lack a consistent goalscorer, and such a player is a reassuring thing to have of course, but until Tuesday our top scorer has been stuck on seven goals since Andy Bishop hit a hat trick in mid-November.

However, our midfield has continued its habit of the last couple of seasons and been chipping in with a useful amount of goals to compensate for the lack of a regular scorer up front. Johnny Hunt has already scored more than twice the number of goals this season than in any previous season, Joe Clarke is one off matching his personal best and Jay Harris needs two to equal his best seasonal tally. Compare that to the 2009-10 season when our central midfielders managed five goals between them!

Still, you can’t help feeling the absence of a consistent scorer. Five players (Hunt, Clarke, Bishop, Brett Ormerod and Rob Ogleby) shared the distinction of being our top league scorer with five goals each going into the Tamworth match. In only one of our seasons in the Conference has our top scorer failed to reach double figures, when Gareth Taylor managed nine in that incredibly drab 2009-10 campaign.

The other reason why it feels like we’re not scoring enough is that we concede far too many goals. Our inability to keep clean sheets puts extra pressure on our attack as in twenty six of our games this season we’ve needed to score at least two goals to win.

With just three clean sheets in our last seventeen matches it’s clear that defensively we need to improve despite having reduced the number of sloppy goals conceded by introducing Andy Coughlin. It’s a big change from our recent experience of success been based on a solid defence. Each of our last four seasons are in the best ten in the club’s history for least goals conceded, with 2011-12 and 2009-10 the top two. Furthermore, two of the eleven highest seasonal clean sheet totals in our history have come in the last four seasons.

To give that a bit of context, if our current defence wants to get into that top ten, they’ll have quite a conclusion to the campaign as they’ll have to concede just eight more goals in the rest of the season as we’ve let in forty-one already and in our tenth best defensive season we conceded forty-nine! Indeed, we’ve already let in eight goals more in the league than we did two seasons ago!