George Thomson looking to take the positives after yet another Harrogate Town fixture is postponed

A significant covering of snow on their Wetherby Road pitch forced the Sulphurites to postpone a fourth consecutive home fixture on Friday lunchtime, though they needed just a few hours to successfully rearrange that game for this coming Tuesday evening.

This means that Simon Weaver’s men don’t need to shift focus, and can pick up where they left off with their preparations for tackling the Grecians when they return to group training.

“I suppose that’s the one positive if we’re playing Exeter again on Tuesday, we are gearing up to take on the same opposition,” midfielder George Thomson said.

“We’ve already done some work on them, so at least we don’t have to start all over again preparing to play a different side.

“The plan is to train Saturday and Sunday, weather permitting. The gaffer [Weaver] and Thirs [Paul Thirlwell] want us back on the training pitch as soon as possible so they can get some more work into us.

“Because the Carlisle game got called of on Tuesday, that essentially became a day off and then we’ve hardly been able to do anything because the pitches have been frozen with the weather.

“It’s not ideal. It’s just been us and our running shoes. We’ve all had to do a few little 5ks on our own the last few days. It’ll be nice just to be able to kick a football again.”

By the time Town do return to the field to tackle Exeter on Tuesday, they will have completed just one game of football in the space of 27 days.

And the timing of what has almost turned into a mid-season break couldn’t have been much worse for Thomson in particular, given that he seemed to have lit the blue-touch paper on his season with two fine goals against Oldham Athletic on Boxing Day.

“It would have been nice to have the chance to really try and build on my performance and goals at Oldham, it’s been a while since I scored two in a game,” the 28-year-old added.

“But you can say the same from a team point of view. That was a really good performance on Boxing Day and we felt as if we carried that into the first 10 minutes of the Carlisle game a few days later before it was abandoned.

“So it’s really frustrating, we wanted to build on that result, get some momentum, start moving forwards, but it’s just a been crazy time.

“It was quite nice to have a little bit of a break and rest the legs initially, however now we are desperate to get back playing. We need games.”

The decision to call off Saturday's match was made at the earliest possible opportunity to save Exeter a long, wasted journey.

But this postponement is already the fourth that Town have been forced into since Christmas, and none of them have been due to Covid-19 issues.

Tuesday's scheduled game at home to Carlisle United was called off as a result of a power outage in the local area. That contest had originally been due to take place on December 29, but was abandoned after just 10 minutes because referee Martin Coy deemed the pitch to have become unsafe.

The Sulphurites' home game against Cheltenham Town on January 2 was also postponed due to a frozen pitch.