Southend United's Paul Sturrock: The next 24 hours are sure to be frantic (From Echo)

Southend United's Paul Sturrock: The next 24 hours are sure to be frantic

11:00am Friday 31st August 2012 in Blues By Paul Sturrock

IT’S guaranteed to be a busy couple of days as tonight sees the transfer window closing and tomorrow we face Wycombe Wanderers at home.

We’re working hard on trying to bring someone in before the deadline closes and we are negotiations with several players at this stage.

Whether or not we complete the deals is in the lap of gods because that’s how these things work.

There have also been plenty of rumours and reports about players moving in the opposite direction.

But clubs have up until 11pm to complete any transfer deals and things often go right until the last minute so it will be a long day before we take on Wycombe at Roots Hall .

They came down from League One last season so will give us a tough test.

However, we ideally need to get a win to really get ourselves going again. Last year we had a good start which we were able to carry through and we need to get something similar started now.

If we had won on the opening day, like we should’ve done with the chances we created against Accrington, then we would be sitting here now with four points and people would be saying we had made a decent start.

That’s why I don’t think it’s time for doom and gloom at the moment, especially after we picked up a point at Northampton last weekend.

Going forward it was good for us to get three goals and we definitely came out with pass marks, even though it was disappointing to let three in at the other end.

It’s certainly not like us to do that and we have to stop conceding so many goals.

With that in mind, there are selection dilemmas again this week and I still have to decide when will be the right time to bring Paul Smith in to the side in goal.

He came in without having had much of a pre-season and you can see in training that he is still a little bit ring rusty.

But he’s improving all the time and I will need to think long and hard about what’s best to do.

There is also plenty of other things to be thinking about though and, with three home games in a week, we want to start getting victories on the board.