Brady identifies the one area Cobblers will aim to improve next season after 'hugely overachieving'

Jon Brady will let the dust settle for a day or two before focusing on the task of building for next season, but he has already identified one area the Cobblers must improve over the summer.

Town enjoyed a mostly excellent campaign and ended up only four points adrift of title-winning Forest Green Rovers, but missed out on automatic promotion to Bristol Rovers on goals scored. They then suffered more disappointment in the play-offs when beaten over two legs by Mansfield.

Cobblers were not necessarily expected to push for promotion this season but they maintained their challenge all the way until the final day when only a freak win for Rovers over Scunthorpe denied them.

If there is one thing that held them back though, it was the depth of the squad. At times, all it took was two or three injuries to destabilise them and upset the balance of the team.

"With this squad, I feel they have hugely overachieved when you look at the size of other squads in the division,” said Brady. “The players' goal was to finish in the top three and get automatic promotion and in the end they missed out on winning the league by four points.

"What they have delivered, and how they have delivered it, week in and week out, they have worked extremely hard.

"Now we have to assess what we have with the players and then try and build and add to that and formulate for how we can build a challenge again.

“At times, I just felt our depth hasn't been big enough so hopefully we can get that sorted.”

Brady took his staff and players to a two-day army training camp in Rutland a week before the season started where they spoke about their expectations and aims for the campaign ahead.

"We went to the army camp and there was a lot of 360 learning between them and us and we sat down together,” Brady explained.

"That (third place) is where they wanted to finish so we delivered to them what we felt they would have to do week in, week out so it was a collective and we helped drive it.

"In the end, we missed out by one goal. We know what transpired on the last day. It was tough to take and I can probably be a bit more honest about that now but we picked ourselves up and over the two legs, we fought and we gave a huge account of ourselves.

"We just couldn't get the outcome we wanted unfortunately.”

The retained list could be announced later today (Friday) after Brady has met the players.

He added: "I need to gather my thoughts first and let things settle for a day or two and then we will start getting organised.

"You plan and we were really positive and we planned that we would go on and be at Wembley but obviously that's not going to be the case.”