Curle not placing too much pressure on the opening game

Win or lose, Cobblers boss Keith Curle will not be placing too much emphasis on Saturday's opening League One game of the season.

Town mark their return to the third tier with a home fixture against AFC Wimbledon before they head to Shrewsbury Town next weekend.

But given his side were languishing down in 18th after 13 games of last season, before going on to win promotion, Curle knows there's little point reading too much into the first few results.

"It's a fantastic opening game against a team that have competed admirably at this level for the past few years," he said. "But it's about the whole season and we want to be a progressive football club.

"Winning the first game doesn't mean you're going to get promoted and having a negative result doesn't mean you're going to get relegated. We're looking to put the building blocks in place.

"When we came back for the play-offs, we knew that was a sprint but now we're taking a first step in a 46-game marathon.

"Every manager, every player, every fan and every chairman will want to win the first game of the season. Does it guarantee you success or failure? It gives you building blocks to maintain a level of improvement.

"No matter what the result is on Saturday, we will learn from it and it will help us make the improvement that we're striving for - the season is not over in one game.

"There will be things that we can learn and development from in every game and that's both winning and losing. We've won games before where we've done a few things wrong but got away with it and there have been other games where we've got beat but performed quite well.

"We have an environment where we don't shy away from challenges and we don't shy away from the fact we need to learn, develop and improve."

Avoiding relegation might be viewed as a successful season for many newly-promoted teams, but Curle has loftier ambitions.

"We want to maintain an upward curve and we want to learn and develop and we want to get as many people as we can on the same page," he added.

"We've got a way of playing and we need the new players to buy into our identity and improve and develop the culture we're trying to create."