Gavin Gunning has said that he has started to see Swindon Town display a different character and more grit about their play in recent matches.

Swindon have still won just two of their seven games since Gunning took over as interim head coach, but despite that lack of consistency of results, he said he felt he was seeing an improvement in the mindset of his players.

Town struggled for long periods against Harrogate Town but scored late to dig out a point and Gunning said that was a positive sign of what would be required of the team moving forward.

He said: “I think it is a mindset [gaining consistency]. You get yourself in a mindset as a player sometimes when the group is fragile, it can be a mentality thing of not being strong mentally.

“Today we should have been going out there and that game was there for us, with the personnel we had on the pitch we should have had a contrasting performance to what we have seen.

“Sometimes that is football and you don’t play well every game and we didn’t do that today.

“But obviously at the end, you have seen that we have shown a different character that we are evolving into.

“We are not rolling over, I think we probably would have been beaten by two or three there before, but we haven’t.

“We have kept going and we should probably nick it with the chance we got at the end, but it still wasn’t the performance that we needed.”

Town have only earned back-to-back wins on two occasions this season, against Sutton United and Walsall and against Mansfield Town and Accrington Stanley, and have never managed to win three games in a row.

The 33-year-old added that being able to find that consistency of results was the next step that Swindon needed to take before the end of the season.

Gunning said: “I think that we have had consistent performances, just today and then against MK Dons weren’t brilliant.

“Apart from that, we have performed really well in every game.

“I think that finding consistency [of results] will be the main thing [for the remainder of the season].

“I think that we have had a very consistent level of performance, the results haven’t been ideal, but they haven’t been bad considering where we were at, but I want to win games, I am never pleased with draws.”