DURING our two weeks without a game, we are going to prepare for the rest of the season.

Our break will give us the opportunity to really make sure that the players are focused enough to try to understand what we are trying to do.

They will also be improving their fitness dramatically so that they are able to do what we are asking them to do.

It will be an important two weeks.

After the hard work in preseason, the expectation is that players will maintain their fitness levels until Christmas.

But playing Saturday- Tuesday-Saturday, as we did earlier in the season, it’s very difficult to get a lot of work in during the week.

Now, this break will give us a great chance to ensure that our fitness levels are right up there.

That should give us another dimension to our game.

There is a very scientific approach to things now.

Many clubs have scientific research and testing to ensure that players are at their optimum every day.

We don’t have that sort of equipment here so we have to use our experience from what we used to do and what we read and talk about with other people to judge what is correct.

As we approach Christmas, Cheltenham have been the surprise team of the season.

Mark Yates has done a fantastic job there and they have changed their philosophy a bit.

They are right there, they are a tough team to beat and they are on a great run.

If they maintain that, then Mark will have a great claim on the manager of the year award in our division. He has done a fantastic job.

At the other end of the table, Dagenham & Redbridge show just how dangerous it is when you get in that downward spiral.

We found that ourselves when we came out of League 1.

To get out of that losing mentality is very tough.

Their manager is very experienced and you would have thought that he is capable of turning that around.

It’s the same with Plymouth.

Now that they are financially safe, they will be a force to be reckoned with as they have the money to throw at it.

We watched them at Stourbridge and they were poor but the great result they had at the weekend against Northampton, another big club finding things difficult, reinforces the belief that they could turn their position around.

While our results in recent weeks have not been what we have asked for, I believe we have been a little unlucky.

There have been occasions when we have made mistakes but our performances have improved and we have certainly learned a lot about ourselves over the last three or four weeks.

During the break, we can work on the things we have highlighted and come back a better team in two-weeks’ time.

Everything else in football has been overshadowed this week by the tragic news of the death of Gary Speed.

It is his family that I think about – he has a wife and two children – but it has been a massive shock to everyone.

In the Wales set-up, things could hardly have gone better and he was doing a fantastic job.

But something somewhere was not right and it makes you sit up and think about what really is important in life.

When this sort of devastating event happens, it reminds us all that football is just a game.