THE sound of banter and laughter leaking from the home dressing room at 5pm on Saturday put the most telling valuation on the draw Tranmere secured from a sprawling scrap with Colchester United at Prenton Park. A single point made little difference to Rovers’ position near the foot of the table. That’s still no matter for a joke. The big value of Saturday’s result was psychological, as Tranmere broke a run of six straight League One defeats that was draining confidence and eating into morale. The spiral of failure was halted. The dressing room, over recent weeks the scene of many a post-match inquest and sombre analysis, returned to something like its natural, boisterous state. Players walked out of it with smiles on their faces. That could be worth a lot more than a point in the long run, both to the team and manager John Barnes. The crisis is by no means over. A meeting with fellow strugglers Wycombe Wanderers tomorrow evening holds its obvious dangers for a team that has won once in nine outings. But Rovers have at least built a platform, however flimsy, on which to build a recovery. The manner in which they secured their first point since August 15 provided encouragement on two fronts for Barnes and assistant Jason McAteer. During the first-half, Rovers played some neat and assertive passing football of a quality they had not touched since the first fortnight of the campaign. It served as a reminder that Barnes’s ambitions for the team in terms of style do have more substance than mere wishful thinking. Just as significantly, Tranmere were robust enough to match muscle with muscle when the game became more of a physical battle during the second half. The crowd, sensing that every player was giving his all in terms of effort, stayed behind the team from first to last. There were no chants for the ousting of the manager and the only booing was directed towards referee Steve Pratt, who made eight bookings in a match contested without venom. Tranmere’s luck also changed for the better. They were not strong enough defensively to prevent the visitors enjoying a narrow advantage in goal-scoring opportunities created over the 90 minutes. But when the chances came, Colchester’s finishing was usually wayward. The U’s, playing an uncompromising long ball game under new manager Aidy Boothroyd, paid Tranmere the compliment of sacrificing some of their own attacking ambitions in the second half, to make it more difficult for the home team to play through midfield. Boothroyd wasn’t entirely happy with his team’s efforts or the outcome. “We did not play well at all,” he complained. “We thought we were going to walk it against a struggling side. It was a wake-up call for us.” | 
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