SATURDAY evening was a time for reflection on the events of that afternoon and our 2-1 defeat by high-flying Scunthorpe.

Just to rub salt into those reflections, Gary Hooper, who was with us last season and did so well for us, thanked all our efforts of getting him back into the shop window and getting his career back on track by scoring the winner against us.

At the time he came here, Gary seemed to be going nowhere with Southend, was not in the top four of their strikers and was possibly heading back to Conference level where he came from.

To be fair to Gary, he did a marvellous job for us last season; 12 goals in 19 games went a long way to securing our promotion place.

And at 20 years of age, I thought he had tremendous potential, sufficient for us to offer £50,000 for him, an almost unheard of sum for this club, and that figure was accepted.

Unfortunately, Gary was away on holiday and by the time we could get to him to discuss personal terms, three other clubs including Scunthorpe, had offered £175,000.

Needless to say, we missed out.

Further reflection brings a number of questions as to why we have found the going so tough in League 1 and why we find ourselves at the bottom of the table.

One win in our opening seven matches indicates there is something seriously wrong.

But there are other questions to be asked: Are we working hard enough? The answer to that is yes. Are we creating chances? Again the answer is yes.

So when we have the ball, I am not too dissatisfied with a lot of our play.

But it comes down largely to defending as a team where we have shown some naivety in our positional play, we showed some naivety in being transfixed with the ball and, at times, failing to see the movement around us from the opposition.

And again, that happened against Scunthorpe.

There is a big difference between Leagues 1 and 2 in quality of passes, in the pace of the game and in the movement of players.

Whereas in League 2 we might have got away with some of that naivety, now we are being punished.

Having said all that, I thought we put in a storming finish and created one or two good shooting opportunities, one of which came, incredibly, back off the inside of a post and fell nicely into the keeper’s arms.

It was a chance late in the game that would have earned us a point.

It is easy to get wrapped up in criticising players, in brow-beating them into losing more confidence.

In my experience, it is necessary to keep the whole place buoyant, to keep a bit of laughter about the place, but at the same time to get the discipline on the field better.

We can do that by concentrating better during the course of games, and continuing to work hard on the pattern of play.

Injuries have not helped, three strikers - Andy Williams, Moses Ashikodi and Steve Guinan - are out, Sam Oji has a serious knee injury and Robbie Threlfall has a broken bone in his foot. They are five decent players who would have been in and around the first-team places.

During the course of the season, these things happen.

The most important thing now is to get the confidence of some good results so we can start to climb the table.

Where better to start than Leeds this Saturday.