HAYDEN Mullins is adamant that the goals will start flowing for his Colchester United side sooner rather than later.

The U's head coach is confident his side will start converting their numerous chances and hit the goal trail, despite their shortage of early-season goals.

Colchester were left to rue missed opportunities against Gillingham in their Papa John’s Trophy Group A opener on Tuesday night, as they fell to a frustrating 1-0 defeat at the JobServe Community Stadium.

The U's have so far netted four times - twice from open play - in their opening seven league and cup matches but they have been carving out opportunities - and head coach Mullins has no doubt that more goals will soon arrive.

Mullins said: “I think the goals will come.

“The hardest thing on the football pitch is to go out and score goals.

“It’s really tough; that’s why those guys get paid a lot of money.

“There’ll be times where we have nights (like the Gillingham game) where we create so much and we don’t score and there’ll be nights where we score four or five.

“We know that’s coming; it’s just the ups and downs of football.

“The chances are there and it’s similar to when people were talking about us not scoring and we went away to Oldham and got two in the space of five minutes.

“We know that as long as we’re creating the chances, the goals will come.”

Mullins is now preparing his Colchester squad for their long trip to play Barrow in League Two, tomorrow night.

The U's boss made a host of changes to his starting line-up for their game against Gillingham, with a number of those players staking a claim to start at Holker Street.

The likes of skipper Tommy Smith, Luke Chambers, Shamal George and Charlie Daniels were all rested, against Gillingham.

Mullins added: “It’s always good to have a headache with selection.

“I thought the boys did so well (against Gillingham) and there wasn’t one player out there who I thought had a bad game.

“They’ve all put themselves in the frame and that’s what we want.

“Training goes a long way to backing that up - we always speak about training properly.

“We want to put people under pressure and we want everyone to have a real good stake.

“The boys who haven’t played so many minutes and have been out of the team did really well."