CERTAINLY a 3-0 defeat represents a less than ideal start to the season for Newport County AFC.

It’s still incredibly early days for Terry Butcher and his charges, and they’ll rightly reflect that the scoreline on Saturday was a little harsh on them.

However, there is no doubt whatsoever this season is looking likely to be a struggle in comparison to last term, which really is no surprise.

We should probably ban comparisons to previous seasons, so futile are they in fairly assessing the Exiles. The budget has been decimated, the money isn’t there anymore.

There are a handful of players in Terry Butcher’s squad – Joe Day, Andrew Hughes, Mark Byrne, Yan Klukowski and Regan Poole – who County fans can confidently assert as being capable of doing a good job in League Two.

The rest of the squad is an unknown quantity to us. All we know for certain is that they are a group who have been assembled for less money, on lower wages.

Ditto Terry Butcher. We absolutely hope and have good reason to believe he’s going to have the experience and ability to make the most of what he has and exceed what seems realistic – a relegation battle – but we don’t know. He’s a new manager, not someone we’ve had good time to assess.

Because it’s incredible to me to read people on the Argus website comparing this season to last, one even using the words “nothing has changed from last season,” which is utterly ridiculous and disrespects two management teams and two groups of players.

Everything has changed from last season.

It needs to be acknowledged that Butcher and his team are working with vastly less resources than the previous management.

And that the players are going to need time to settle in to a totally new environment.

Last term Newport had a very established, very talented manager in Justin Edinburgh, working with a good budget thanks to the implicit trust he had from chairman Les Scadding.

Gillingham looked a million dollars on day one in League One and many of us believe Edinburgh is going to go far, to the Championship and beyond.

And with the likes of Ismail Yakubu, Darren Jones, Ryan Jackson, Robbie Willmott, Lee Minshull, Mike Flynn, Adam Chapman, Max Porter and Aaron O’Connor, he had reliable and consistent performers who functioned as a cohesive unit. Never, from day one in the Football League, did Newport fans have to concern themselves with relegation.

Hopefully we won’t this term either. And positivity is certainly likely to benefit everyone in the coming weeks.

But comparative struggles are likely, compared to last term. Some supporters spent so much time misguidedly moaning about Edinburgh’s brand of football, they couldn’t see the wood for the trees. It was a golden time, and such heights might not be reached for a long while.