PAUL Cox wants his players to keep shooting for the stars as they enter a crucial stage in a potential National League promotion push.

Barrow AFC have surprised many observers with a first half to the season which has seen them climb as high as third and cement themselves among the contenders for a place in the Football League.

A 26-match unbeaten run across all competitions was at the heart of that surge into the top five and, despite a recent run of three successive defeats and the lack of a league win wince late November, Cox has not let go of his lofty aims for the campaign.

“We set goals at the beginning of the season, and we need to maintain those goals and not put any extra pressure on ourselves,” he said.

“I want to win a championship. The players want to win the championship. Everyone wants to win the championship. But there are clubs at this level of football who are paying out some Championship wages, and who have infrastructures and fan-bases that are based on League One and even the Championship.

“We’re not going to get our own way 24/7, and when we don’t there needs to be careful consideration and planning for the next stage to make sure that we are continuously growing in a way that we’re not going to implode. That’s what we planned at the beginning of the season – I’ve never come away from what we want to achieve.

“You can always aim for the stars. Sometimes you don’t get there, but you finish above where you rightly should be. Nothing has changed in my mind, I want to get back to enjoying it and I hope everyone else does.”

He added: “We've had such a fabulous first half of the season, that to let that dwindle now would be very uncharacteristic of this group of players. We want to be positive, we want to get back to playing with a smile on our faces and enjoying football.

“We want to remember who we are, what our goals for this season are and make sure that we are are pushing the squad forward every month.”

Cox does not pretend to have expected Barrow to have done quite so well as they have in the first five months of the season, but at the same time he does not want to see the effort already put in come to nothing by the time May rolls around.

“It’s stupid what we have done in little over a year,” the AFC boss said. “It’s been 14 months since I have been here and the games lost have been minimal, and when we go to some of the big boys now, we can rub shoulders with them.

“I don’t want this to be overnight success and then back to the same old, same old. We said at the beginning of the season that we would get to Christmastime and plan accordingly. I think there needs to be an awful lot of planning, an awful lot of thought going into where we are, where we want to go, and how we get there. That is key now at this football club.