"We feel the group is gelling and getting better and better week on week" - Town boss Millington on his team, Maidenhead and the race for the play-offs

Halifax host Maidenhead on Saturday, barring a pitch inspection at The Shay on Friday afternoon, hoping to bounce back from their 3-0 defeat at Southend United last time out after Tuesday's home game against Solihull was postponed.

Town are ninth in the National League, one point outside the top seven.

"We've got to put a run of games together," said the Town manager when asked if he felt The Shaymen had proven they were good enough to reach the play-offs.

"If you think back to the back end of last season, we went through March and April with just one defeat against Chesterfield away.

"We've got to do that again, we've got to start putting runs together because, yes, we've shown that we can be play-off contenders, we've shown that we can get good results away at the likes of Barnet and Solihull and we performed well away at Chesterfield, although we didn't get anything out of that game, but certainly took plenty of positives out of the performance.

"We know we can compete with the top teams in this division, what we've got to do is put consistent runs of results together now.

"Consistency is the watchword, but performing in a consistent fashion week-in, week-out has got to be matched by the results we pick up.

"We know we're capable of doing that, what we've got to do is show everyone else by actually doing it."

Millington says the fight for promotion in the National League is as open as he has ever known it.

"Chesterfield are the runaway leaders and barring a catastrophe for them, they're likely to win the division," he said.

"But then after that it starts to get very congested.

"We fancy ourselves, we think that our squad of players, our group of players, is always going to be stronger in the second-half of the season as opposed to the first.

"We're going to work hard to make sure we pick up more points in the second-half of the season than we did in the first-half and we feel the group is gelling and getting better and better week on week.

"We're really excited about the second-half of the season and if we perform and we get a little bit of luck, then we stand a very, vey solid chance of making the play-offs.

"After that it's a cup competition and we think, given our strong defensive record, there won't be many teams relishing the opportunity of playing Halifax Town in a one-off, winner-take-all type of game."

Maidenhead are 14th in the table with two wins, two defeats and two draws from their last six matches.

"They don't concede many, they're a very hard-working team," Millington said.

"They're often mis-represented in terms of their ability.

"I think they're an absolutely fantastic team, we've got a lot of time for their top 14, 15 players, they're very, very good and would get in a lot of the top National League sides.

"What we've also got to respect is the form table over the last ten games, they're way above us, so we can't take them lightly.

"We can't go into this game expecting to get anything out of it unless we're absolutely at it and that's what we'll try and be so we can earn the right to take away the three points."

Town lost 1-0 at Maidenhead earlier this season and have only scored once in their last five games against them.

When asked if he expected the onus to be on his team to break Maidenhead down on Saturday, Millington said: "If you look at the away game, a lot of the second-half it was attack v defence, Sam Johnson didn't have a great deal to do second-half.

"And I would expect, later in the game, they do tend to sit a bit deep and try and absorb pressure, so there will be spells in the game where I would expect us to have a lot of possession and have to break them down.

"But they will come and try to win the game, they're not going to sit in and just play for a point, they'll want to try and earn all three.

"So we're going to have to be on our mettle in terms of our defending as well.

"It'll be a tough match, there's never an easy game against Maidenhead."

Millington says two weeks without a game has given Town the chance to iron out a few wrinkles from the defeat at Southend.

"The Southend game was a great learning curve for us because they're a team we respect massively, they're a team who we really feel we're probably most similar to in the division in terms of our high intensity, energetic, hard-working, organised style," he said.

"And they were better than us on the day. There were a couple of things in particular that they did very well that we've got to do better.

"So the Southend game, coupled with a couple of weeks of training, have given us an opportunity to really focus the lads' attention on a couple of areas of the game we want to get better at.

"The Maidenhead game is a real good litmus test of how successful we've been in putting that work together and whether or not we can see the transfer from training into games."