Colchester United midfielder Harry Pell's weekly Gazette column

The P word

THE only ‘P’ word we’re concentrating on is progression.

We’re not talking much about promotion.

We feel that we’ve come a long way and although we have just beaten the title favourites Lincoln City, our feet are firmly on the ground.

We are fully focused and the players aren’t getting carried away at all.

The reason the boys celebrated like we did at the end of the Lincoln game was not because we’d just beaten Lincoln but we had in-house targets that we had met.

We put ourselves under big pressure in house because of losing at Grimsby Town and we knew that at that stage, we were points shy of where we needed to get to.

Managers work in different ways – footballers are sometimes not the smartest and they need something to keep them focused sometimes.

The gaffer works like that and at the end of the month, it’s great when you’ve met your target and tick it off as a success.

If you look at the first three months of the season, it’s something that’s given us to consistently work for.

This is the best squad I’ve been involved with, in terms of being able to change shape at key times during games.

We’re very unpredictable for opposition teams in that respect and we’re all buying into what the gaffer is trying to do.

Colchester United as a football club are looking very strong both on and off the pitch.

The fans are buying into what we’re trying to do and I think they know that we have a team that’s willing to fight until the end.

They got behind us a lot against Lincoln last Saturday and we’re hoping that they’ll do the same against Swindon Town, this weekend.

Homework pays off

THE homework that we did on Lincoln City in the build-up to the game was crucial.

We needed the result and we spent 45 minutes standing out in the freezing cold last Friday, going through every single one of their set plays.

It was quite boring to be honest but the homework that we as players and the staff did before the game was really important.

I know their management are massive on little percentages and you need to be good at set-pieces, in this league.

I played a bit of a different role against Lincoln – I was a bit deeper and we knew that they had threats up top and I thought that we nullified their threats tremendously well.

The gaffer and Bally gave me a job to do and I took it with both hands.

If you’re going to be successful, every single player needs to think of the team rather than individual achievements.

Let’s follow it up

WE’RE fully focused on our game against Swindon Town, this weekend.

We’ve just beaten the league leaders and the last time people were talking about us like this was when we beat Crewe Alexandra 6-0 and we struggled the game after that against Northampton Town.

We know that we need to learn from that and this game now becomes bigger than the Lincoln one for us.

We’ve given ourselves an opportunity to go into the top three if we win and other results go our way and we’re working hard to be in and around it.

Swindon will be a tough test and they have former Bolton and West Ham player Matty Taylor in their ranks, who I’ve played against plenty of times before.

He’s had a great career and played at a very high level and he’s clearly got a lot of talent.

Vichai has left a legacy

THE terrible events that occurred at Leicester City on Saturday night put a lot of things into firm perspective.

The helicopter crash that resulted in the death of five people including Foxes owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was a tragic event and so sad.

You can see what a respected man he was behind the scenes and I love football clubs like that – you can see that the fans had a fantastic relationship with him.

I’ve been lucky enough in my career to win promotion in a team that was rallying together and the same thing happened at Leicester when they won the Premier League.

They were very successful under Vichai and he has really built something there.

Pitch perfect

A LOT has been said about the condition of the Wembley pitch for the Spurs-Manchester City game on Monday night, after the American Football game last weekend had left it in a bit of a state.

Pep Guardiola said that there were no excuses and it was the same for both sides and I thought City did a very professional job in winning the game.

I buzzed off what City’s Fernandinho said after the game – he said it looked like a carpet, compared to the ones he used to play in back in Brazil!

Some of these Premier League players don’t know how lucky they are to be playing on the pitches that they do and it was the same for both teams.

When we got promoted at Cheltenham, we shared with Gloucester and the pitch was horrendous.

But we turned it into a positive and if anything, it meant teams not want to come and play us at our place even more.

I have to say that Dave Blacknall, our groundsman at Colchester, has got to take a lot of credit for our fantastic pitch.