I WAS disappointed by our defeat to Chesterfield on Saturday but, for the first time this season, I haven’t looked at the DVD recording of the game.

Sometimes I think things can play on your mind too much, so I’m looking forward to our next game and focusing on playing Rotherham United.

It will be another difficult game as they’re second in the table and we’re facing a hard run of fixtures right now.

Chesterfield, who we played last weekend, are top and Bury, who come to Roots Hall on Friday, are sixth, so we are in the middle of some hard games.

Rotherham will be a difficult place to go to, especially as they showed good spirit to come back to draw 3-3 at Stockport on Tuesday night with two goals in the last six minutes.

But by the time we go there I would also like to think that we will have made a new signing.

I’m confident it can happen but bringing a player in is certainly not as simple as it used to be.

We’re talking to the player, his agent, the club and chief executive and it’s someone who I have followed throughout their career.

I don’t like to say too much about who we are trying to sign so I won’t say what position they play or anything like that as I wouldn’t want to disappoint our fan base if it didn’t come off.

But we’re working incredibly hard to strengthen our squad and we’re exploring the possibility of making both loan and permanent signings.

I know we need a freshness to the team and I’ve also been disappointed by the goals we’ve been given away.

Three of the last five goals we’ve let in have come from set pieces with two penalties and a free-kick going in, so we must improve in that area.

Because of that we’ve been working Mark Phillips, Peter Gilbert and Miguel Comminges hard in training. They need to improve their fitness after spells out of action, so we’ve given them plenty of ball work to be getting on with. With them coming back, I’ve allowed Luke Prosser to join Rushden and Diamonds on loan for three months. Luke made a few mistakes in games he played for us and became the whipping boy for a while.

But he’s 22-years-old, which is very young for centre-back, and has massive potential. He just needs to get games to get more experience and to improve certain areas of his game which the loan move will allow him to do.

At the opposite end of the pitch, I decided to bring Matt Paterson back in attack against Chesterfield.

I thought he deserved a chance after his performances as a substitute and in training.

It didn’t work out in terms of us getting a win but I think we had just as many chances as Chesterfield did, if not more.

We just need to start taking more of the opportunities we create, starting with the game at Rotherham on Saturday.

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