Frankie Kent insists Colchester United’s players have always believed that they can challenge for a promotion spot, this season.

But the U’s centre-back has stressed they are not getting carried away, despite their excellent run of form.

Colchester are only out of the League Two play-off positions on goal difference following their 3-2 win at Swindon Town and sit just four points off the automatic promotion places.

John McGreal’s side have lost only two of their last 13 league games and defender Kent says they have always been confident they can launch a challenge for a League One return.

Kent said: “We’ve said from the start of the season that we’ve all had the belief to be up in the top seven, at least.

“We just want to keep this run going and everyone is looking forward to going into training and the games, especially the big matches - I feel like all of the boys are really up for them.

“We’re on a good little run but we don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves and we’ll take it game by game.

“We’ve got quite a busy schedule coming up and quite a lot of games.

“But when you’re winning, you want to keep the momentum going and I feel like we’ve been doing that, so we just have to carry it on.

“We can’t get too carried away and we have to keep working hard in training which all of the boys have been doing and go about it the right way.”

Kent played his part at both ends in Colchester’s win at Swindon, scoring their equaliser just before half-time at the County Ground. The former U’s academy player, who has now scored three times this season, said: “It came at me a bit quickly – Kyel Reid whipped the ball in and I’ve gone front post.

“It just bounced down and it was one of those where I didn’t want to lash it.

“But I felt like I had quite a bit of time and knew that if I got a good enough connection, I wasn’t too far out and luckily it hit the post and went in.

“Overall, I thought it was a great team performance.

“I thought we had the better of the first half but didn’t create too many chances.

“I scored with the last kick of the half and if you’re going in at half-time 1-0 down away from home, it’s always going to be hard to get back into the game.

“I felt like the goal deflated them and we went in at half-time knowing that we had to be the better team, in the second half which I thought we were.

“I thought we did really well and they only came back into it out of a nothing set piece, which we needed to do better with.

“But we got the winner and we’re really happy.

“Some of the possession play we produced just shows the quality that we have and what we’ve been doing over the last couple of months.”