LET’S start this week by avoiding the elephant in the room and deal instead with something positive – the performance of Swindon Town old boy Charlie Austin for QPR against Manchester City on Saturday, writes Danny Hall.

Five years almost to the day, Town Flier ventured up the M4 to the Madejski Stadium on a Tuesday afternoon to watch a reserves game in which Austin played his first game in a Swindon shirt.

My intro read – ‘The future’s bright, the future’s Charlie Austin’.

I went on: “Austin scored two goals, earned a penalty, won his flick-ons, held the ball up well, harried the defence, showed he has a shot with his right foot and a decent first touch, and almost always chose the right option when passing or making runs.

“And, despite two prolonged bouts of treatment in the second half, after twice being accidentally butted when going up for challenges, he got up to score the sort of bullet header that you will never see Simon Cox score in a million years.”

There is now a groundswell of ‘Austin for England’ opinion building and why not? England don’t have a goal scorer and what young Chaz has proved from Poole Town through Swindon and now in the Premiership is that he most certainly is that.

In front of a watching Roy Hodgson he got a goal and an assist against City and was denied another goal by an obscure rule. Against one of the most expensively assembled defences in the top flight, he was outstanding.

Sorry, now we have to deal with Swindon’s shameful 5-0 defeat to League Two Cheltenham Town in the FA Cup on Saturday – which followed early exits against lowly Macclesfield in the previous two years.

I’ll start with our strikers because the manager and the camp insist they are good. They’re not.

Any successful side will have at least one striker who could perform at a higher level. You will never convince me that Obika, Williams or Smith are Championship strikers. And at Whaddon Road they posed no threat whatsoever to an average League Two side.

As for the defence, where do you start?

I have some sympathy for the captain Nathan Thompson who picked up his third red card of the season on Saturday.

The way we play – with Nathan being the first man to get us going from the back and the last man when dealing with opposition attacks – he will inevitably pick up more cards than when he was a full back.

It can also be argued that a number of his cards, including Saturday’s, were undeserved. But he and manager Cooper must still address his poor disciplinary record and at the very least cut out any unnecessary bookings.

With the biggest game of the season on the horizon against league leaders Bristol City, one has to be fearful of the outcome with our three best outfield players – Kasim, Luongo and Thompson – all missing for a variety of reasons.

How we line up is going to be intriguing to say the least. Does Cooper let Nathan’s brother Louis take his brother’s place in the back three or play Rossi Branco, whose comeback-from-injury cameo at Whaddon Road was a disaster.

I guess keeper Wes Foderingham will wear the captain’s armband. And that we will play with two holding, damage-limitation midfielders, as we did in the fine win over Preston. What we must hope for is that Swindon Town put in the sort of shift that Yeovil did against us recently when they were coming off an utter mauling at Port Vale.

The County Ground crowd will even accept defeat in our main local derby of the season if all the players come off the field having given everything – something that was patently not the case against Cheltenham.