THERE have been talks among the players this past week about the off-field wranglings going on at the club.

As coaches, we do our best to keep all of this out of the dressing room but you can’t stop the players looking at certain websites.

We want to leave all the off-field stuff to other people and concentrate on playing football.

But we can’t use the off-field wranglings as an excuse for Saturday’s defeat to Hayes and Yeading United.

It was a very disappointing performance and it is hard to put a finger on why it happened.

Even when the score was 0-0, some of the players’ heads were down.

After the game, we all sat out on the pitch, like we do whether we win, lose or draw, and had a chat about what had just happened.

Views were aired from some of the senior guys like Graham Ward and Jon Richardson — among others — and we need our senior lads to help the younger ones through these tough games.

What was pleasing for myself though was the way the lads responded in training on Monday night.

We had a good session, another good talk about Saturday and should have another good evening of training on Thursday.

By the time we had finished training on Monday I was feeling a lot better about things after being pretty down from the weekend.

But now we have to take this positive response from the training ground on to the pitch at Weston-super-Mare on Saturday before our massive home game with Bath City on Bank Holiday Monday.

Weston is going to be a tough game. They have got quality players with plenty of league experience and goal-scorers, including the likes of Marvin Brown.

But this is a tough league and they have had a similar start to the season as we have had.

I have told the players that the team who make the least mistakes over the course of the season will be right up there.

But we made too many mistakes on Saturday.

Sometimes if you play well and get beaten by the odd goal you can accept it, but Hayes fully deserved their victory.

It was a performance no-one had expected.

I’m just glad that we have the opportunity to put it right on Saturday.

We have a busy period coming up and if we can get back on track, then we will be up in the play-off positions again.

I know six points out of nine sounds pretty good but not when you put in a disappointing performance like we did on Saturday.

Hopefully, we will have midfielders Matt Dodd and Dave Bampton back for the trip to Weston. They both trained on Monday night.

We do have a slight doubt over Matt Dinsmore, who has a foot infection, but he is on a course of antibiotics and should be OK for the weekend.