HARRY Pell insists that consistency is going to be the key to success for Colchester United this season as the U's make sure they don't get ahead of themselves in the race for League Two promotion.

A trip to Morecambe lies ahead for John McGreal's team on Saturday as they look to build on the 3-1 home victory against Crawley last weekend.

The three points they earned, thanks to goals by Sammie Szmodics, Frank Nouble and Luke Norris, took the U's back up into League Two's play-off places and they want to make sure they stay within that top seven now they are back in it.

But Pell knows they can't look too far ahead and says focus is being kept short-term within the Colchester squad to make sure they keep their consistency.

“It’s going to plan," said the 26-year-old attacking midfielder, who joined the U's from Cheltenham Town in the summer.

“The most important thing over the course of the season is that we’ve all agreed to narrow the season down into blocks.

“We break it down into months and have targets - both individually and collectively – that we want to hit.

“That all comes down to consistency with the team and the number of points we tally, each month.

“As a team, we just want to be as consistent as possible.

“You get teams that win, draw and lose and we don’t want to be one of those teams.

“We want to continuously pick up points and be hard to beat and express ourselves.

“If you look across the whole of the team at the minute, there are a lot of people expressing themselves in the right way.

“Confidence is at a really good level at the moment but there’s a difference between confidence and being complacent and we don’t want to be the latter.

“Training has been really good and we’re in a really good place at the moment.

“There’s not much of a gulf between teams at this level and it just comes down to consistency.

“If you look at this division over the last couple of the years and the likes of Wycombe, Luton and Accrington, they’ve picked up points when they haven’t played great.

“It’s impossible that you’ll have 46 games where your team’s at it.

“But if you can consistently pick up points and roll your sleeves up which we can do, that’s ever so important and stands you in good stead."