Colchester United will head to Stevenage tomorrow in buoyant mood, following their recent upturn in form.

And experienced forward Chris Porter believes confidence levels within the squad are as high as they has ever been, in his two years at the U’s.

Colchester are five games unbeaten in League Two, having taken 13 points from a possible 15 and conceded only once in that time.

Porter returned to the U’s squad for the first time in nearly two months at Luton Town on Boxing Day, coming off the bench to help them register an impressive 1-0 win at Kenilworth Road.

That lifted them into the top ten of the table and Porter says everyone is upbeat.

Porter said: “This is probably the most confident that we’ve been as a squad since I came to Colchester.

“Last season was definitely the worst, confidence-wise.

“The first season I was here, even though we were down near the bottom there was still a lot of confidence that we wouldn’t go down and it’s probably on a par with that.

“I think we were very unlucky in a lot of the matches in the ten-game winless run and I didn’t think that we played particularly badly in a lot of those games.

“We were the better team a lot of the time but we’d concede late goals like the one at Plymouth, which was an absolute fluke.

“We just weren’t getting the rub of the green and it’s not surprised me that we’ve come out of that and started winning games again.

“A lot of the top teams have not had the injuries that we’ve had to our key players and hopefully now, we won’t have many injuries to our key players and they might get a few.

“There’s no reason why we can’t kick on now and continue winning and drawing games.”

Porter will be hoping to be involved at Stevenage tomorrow, having recovered from a troublesome hamstring that had kept him sidelined since October.

“It’s been seven or eight weeks now and I’m buzzing to be back,” said the 33-year-old, who is Colchester’s leading scorer with six goals.

“It’s gone on longer than I expected and the injury came out of nowhere.

“I got through the Plymouth game and I didn’t feel anything and then in the week’s training, it just came gradually came on.

“I tried to come back twice and I’d train at 80-90 per cent thinking I might be able to get through the games but then on the evening before the Yeovil game, I was in agony again so it obviously wasn’t right.

“Fortunately, the last set of injections seem to have done the trick.”