After his side were complimented by a former England manager last Saturday, Barrow AFC boss Ian Evatt believes the fact they were disappointed to draw at Dagenham & Redbridge is a sign of how far they’ve come.

The Bluebirds had to accept a 0-0 draw at Victoria Road, as they came just short of running up their third away win in a row.

There wasn’t much wrong with their performance in East London, aside from their old problem of not taking their chances, and their showing found favour with Daggers manager Peter Taylor.

The experienced Taylor managed England once, back in November 2000, for the Three Lions’ friendly in Italy, while the FA waited for Sven-Goran Eriksson to take charge of the national side.

Evatt said: “Again, it’s a mark of how far we’ve come that we’re disappointed to have gone away from home to Dagenham & Redbridge, who not long ago were a League club, and drawn.

“That’s a mark of how good our team is and I can’t stress enough how complimentary Peter Taylor was after the game.

“That was an ex-England manager telling us what a good team we are, so that’s credit to us and we’ll keep going.”

Barrow’s injury problems have eased slightly in recent weeks, with the return of defenders Sam Hird and Josh Granite, and they have several other players nearing a return to fitness, including Connor Brown, Rhys Turner and Dior Angus.

With some in AFC’s squad playing for their futures, Evatt is hoping a combination of that and having more options to choose from in the weeks ahead can help the Bluebirds to a strong finish to the National League season.

He said: “We haven’t really got the numbers to tweak it [at the moment].

“Obviously, we want to try and win every game and we’ll keep going for as long as we can.

“The boys now are really fit – you’ve seen all season that we finish games, nine times out of ten, stronger than the opposition and we did that again at Dagenham.

“We’ll keep going, we’ll keep working hard and we’ll try and get maximum points out of the last four games, take the positives and hopefully finish in the top ten, which has been our aim all season.”