IT’S been great to welcome Roy O’Donovan and George Friend in on loan.

With the size of the squad we have it’s always good to bring in new players and they’ve already proved their importance.

Roy scored at Brighton and George came on for Johnny Herd when he got injured and it’s good to have them with us.

We haven’t made them sing yet - but it won’t be long.

We told them all about it during our pre-match meal at Brighton but, a couple of beetroots faces later, we thought it would be fair to give them a bit more time.

We may spread it out and have one of them singing before the Brentford game and then another one before we play Stockport.

I think they are now more nervous about this than their football and, having given them more time, we’re expecting big things from them.

Roy is Irish so he must be able to sing and maybe a bit of Boyzone or Danny Boy could be coming our way very soon!

KEEP THE HOME RUN GOING

WE welcome Oldham Athletic to Roots Hall this weekend and we want to continue our good home record.

Since I’ve been here we’ve always done well at Roots Hall and we want to keep that going and make it a place teams don’t like coming to.

We’re certainly confident ahead of the game and did well to win an entertaining game at Brighton last Saturday.

We gave away two bad goals which we’re still disappointed about but we had a bit of luck go our way for once and also showed good character to win.

It was a great finish from Francis Laurent right at the end and it maintains what I think has been an excellent start to the season for us.

LAUGHING AT JEFF'S POWERFUL SHOTS

JEFF (Jean-Francois Christophe) has been getting plenty of stick this week for saying in an interview that he is changing his technique to make his shots more powerful.

It’s something that I certainly haven’t heard of before and he claims that what he said was mistranslated but it’s given us all a good laugh and given him something to sulk about!

FIVE REFS NOT FOR ME

AWAY from Southend United we’ve seen matches taking place since my last column in the Europa League with five match officials.

I have to say I’m not convinced by this and we run the risk of ruining the game a little bit by the way we over analyse everything.

The time-keeping in the Manchester derby at the weekend is an example of this and now every single incident gets shown over and over again.

It’s part and parcel of football that mistakes are going to be made every now and then but it’s part of the game.

And for me the only change that should be considered is whether or not to introduce replays to show whether or not the ball has crossed the goal-line.