Things may be looking bleak at the moment but there have been some great escapes in the past.

It's been done before but we have got to make sure we are going into the last day of the season with a fighting chance. That may mean going to Swansea needing to win and hoping other teams lose but as long as we have that chance, anything can happen.

I know from my time at Burnley, even though I wasn't at the club when they survived being the first team ever to go out of the Football League after winning and two other teams lost, the fans still talk about that in an almost sadistic way of how good it was.

It turned out to be a catalyst to an upturn in fortunes for the club and since then, they have built on what they already had. A couple of years later they got out of the old Fourth Division and into the re-named Division Two with the introduction of the Premiership, ironically, here at York City.

It gives a different mentality to things. People learn from their mistakes and what happened there sparked some radical changes as everyone vowed it would never happen again.

There was a great deal of positives to come out of it at the end, so hopefully we can come out of this and learn in a similar way.

One of the greatest escapes ever was at Carlisle at the end of the 1998/99 season when on-loan goalkeeper Jimmy Glass scored in injury-time to keep them up.

With one minute of the season to go they were relegated when all of a sudden, their 'keeper popped up in the box and made a hero of himself.

That's what happens. Me or one of my players could step forward and create that one moment of magic - but we have got to keep going to get it.

Football has a funny way of chucking things up at you, and at the moment it is chucking the results wrongly at us but we have got to keep the belief and keep sticking at it.

When I was at Burnley, we needed to win the final game of the season at Scunthorpe and rely on someone else losing to get promoted. That was a bizarre situation.

There was a togetherness and ruthlessness. It was a fight - it wasn't pretty - but there was a sense that people wanted it.

It got to the point where we were sat in the dressing-room afterwards and we still didn't know if we were up. Eventually it filtered through that Wrexham - who had already been relegated and had nothing to play for - had gone and done it. The rest is history and they went up, but it goes to show that it can be done.

If you look at Portsmouth v Manchester United last week, nobody thought Pompey could have done it but they did.

After Swansea won on the last day of the season last year to stay up, it could prove to be a great irony if we have to go there needing a win to stay up and if we find ourselves in that predicament, it will certainly be a funny old game if things work out.

I hope we go there with a fighting chance. The race will go to the wire as long as we keep getting the results, and fingers crossed, arms crossed, legs crossed and everything else crossed, all the rest will go in our favour too.

In the mean-time, we have got to continue putting everything in because you never get anything out of life - and not just in football - if you don't work hard and believe in yourself.

Updated: 11:02 Thursday, April 22, 2004