LAST Saturday was a bad day at the office for us – especially if your name is Tom Naylor – and we’re all desperate to put things right at Exeter today.

Losing at home to Morecambe was disappointing, especially in the manner we did, but we are going to lose games.

There are no guarantees in football so we’ve just got to go out at St. James’ Park this afternoon and give it our best shot.

And hopefully we won’t score two own goals and give away a penalty again!

Tom has been brilliant this week and I didn’t expect anything else from him because he’s a strong character.

You’ve got to be strong in this game. The weak minded players don’t survive. Tom is strong enough to deal with it and we’ll all help him as well.

I’ve touched on psychology in my coaching courses and you have to treat every player as an individual. Some players need a real talking to and some need an arm around the shoulder in that situation.

We’re all different and it’s the same in all walks of life. I think the gaffer has dealt with it well this week and I’ve got no worries about Tom if he plays today.

He’s had a bit of banter from the lads in training. We’ve been calling him Jonjo after Jonjo Shelvey’s performance for Swansea against Liverpool on Monday.

But he’s taken that really well. He’s not one to sulk and feel sorry for himself. He wants to keep his place and I’m sure he’ll be fine.

He didn’t mean to do it and to be fair he could have been helped out a few times with some better communication.

We win together and we lose together. We are a close-knit unit and we all want to get a win this week to make sure last week is a distant memory.

Having said that we know that Exeter is going to be a tough place for all of us to go. They won with a late goal last week and we had a disappointing result so we will have to go there and try to turn the tables.

The fans are looking forward to it and so are we. It’s great to hear that we’ve sold about 800 tickets and it should be a great occasion.

Hopefully I’ve done enough to keep my place after making my first start in the Football League for my home town club last week.

That was a proud moment for me. I want to be playing football and apart from the result it was nice to be out there again and be a part of the team from the start.

Away from the club this week our captain David Pipe and I did some coaching at a school in the Caerphilly area and it was a real eye-opener for me.

The kids were all under nines and they just didn’t want to listen to us.

I know I’m sounding really old as I write this but kids these days just don’t want to listen to anyone!

My old teachers will probably remember it differently but I know when I was nine if two professionals had come to do some coaching at my school I’d have been hanging off their every word.

It was enjoyable but also a bit frustrating and I learned something about myself – I don’t have the patience to coach kids! I don’t know how their teachers cope. I’ll be sticking to the over-16s from now on.