I WILL never forget the scenes at Wembley Stadium on Sunday, mainly because of the number of Southend fans who travelled up to the support the side for the JPT final.

Having grown up in the area myself and being a Blues fan, it made it extra special to see 31,000 or 32,000 people cheering on the club.

And I think that’s something everyone should be very proud of.

There are many clubs in leagues higher than us who could not take a following like that to Wembley and I would be very surprised indeed if Wigan Athletic, a Premier League side, have as many fans as we did when they go there this weekend for the semi-finals of the FA Cup.

That again shows the potential of the club and that there is huge interest in the team.

We now have to try to get things right on a more consistent basis to keep more fans involved and, with that in mind, it was a real shame we suffered a 2-0 defeat.

I actually thought it was quite a good game as lower league cup finals go, and there were goalscoring chances at both ends of the pitch.

But Crewe just had that extra bit of quality and know-how on the day.

Their decision making was also better than ours and I thought the game showed the step up in standard that there is in League One.

Maybe in the league matches we play we might not have been punished for the mistakes we made.

However, we have to learn from what went wrong and concentrate on the matches we have coming at.

We all want to be playing against good footballing teams like Crewe on a more consistent basis and visit better stadiums than we currently do in the level that we’re playing up.

But for that to happen, we have to start getting better results and that needs to begin at Rochdale tomorrow night.

The scorelines went our way again on Saturday with quite a few of the teams in and around us dropping points.

That means we do still have a slight chance of making the top seven ourselves, but it only remains a slight chance if we win at Spotland.

You know you’re in for a tough test whenever you go there and they have some excellent players in their squad. They also had a fantastic win at Fleetwood Town at the weekend so they will be full of confidence for the game as well.

But we need to pick ourselves up from the disappointment of losing to Crewe and get back to winning ways.

The manager stressed the importance of that immediately after the game on Sunday and I’m sure everyone will start to feel much better again if we pick up the three points tomorrow night.