After heaping praise on his players for “blitzing” Cambridge United on Saturday, boss Neal Ardley dug out his calculator and laid the play-off stats on the line.

Goals from Paul Robinson, Lyle Taylor, Jon Meades and Adebayo Azeez buried Cambridge 4-1 in their own back yard.

The Dons victory, which extended their unbeaten run to four games, lifted them to 10th in the League Two table, three points off the play-off places.

They now go into a two-week break as the FA Cup takes centre stage this weekend, before returning to action on January 16 at home to Mansfield Town.

Ardley said: “We’ve got 21 games to go and we need to average 1.6 or 1.65 points per game to get to the mark where we think the play-offs will be.

“It’s hard, because you look at the top four and you think they will all be there at the end of the season, so there are three spaces that everyone is battling for and everyone is winning games.

“You cannot look at the table and ask ‘where have we moved to?’ after every game, you just have to keep in mind the average.

“We’re unlikely to go unbeaten for the rest of the season, but we have to keep averaging 1.65 points.”

He added: “The play-offs are the goal, absolutely, and we will be disappointed if we cannot get there, and that’s how we have to position it.

“It might still be a fantastic season even if we don’t make the play-offs, but we’re going for it, we need to get 1.65 points per game and we will keep working our socks off to get them.

“We’ve come up against a team in really good form and we’ve blitzed them. The boys deserve great credit.”