IT'S always good to reach a peak after five-and-a-half weeks of fairly intensive pre-season training.

The aim is to try to bring players to the peak for the opening game of the season and it could not have gone any better for us.

To score four times, keep a clean sheet and give a very solid and, at times, exciting performance is just what we were looking for.

In the pre-season build-up, we do go into the preparation very carefully.

We have visits from our dietician and we have weights with Tony Ford which have been done religiously twice a week.

We have tests at Gloucester University and we have also enlisted the help of a sports psychologist who has thrown one or two ideas into the melting pot, particularly about the players and how they view themselves.

One exercise was for players to make a list of the attributes of a player, probably in their position, that they admired and mark those attributes out of 10.

Then they had to do something similar for themselves.

John Trewick and I also marked our own players and so, too, did their team-mates so there were three basic views of a player's attributes in different categories.

There were some interesting answers that came out, particularly in how the players viewed themselves.

The days have gone of tea-cup throwing and managers ranting and raving. Now it is a case of the carrot rather than the stick.

Players have got to take charge of certain things themselves and to 'buy in' to everything rather than be forced into it, to willingly want to run that extra yard or work that extra half-hour in training. We certainly seem to have that at the moment.

On the opening day of the season, everybody has done the five-and-a-half weeks of hard work and some have to cope with the disappointment of not being included in the side.

Danny Carey-Bertram, Rob Purdie and Craig Stanley were three players, in particular, who have had good pre-seasons and it's important for the dressing-room in how people like that react to not starting.

From what I have seen so far, we have a group of players - 21 pros at the moment - where there is a fair degree of camaraderie and spirit.

There is a vital ingredient to any side and that is team spirit. Often you cannot define how it has been achieved but players just gel together as a group and work hard for each other. I had it at Wolves and Shrewsbury and I just sense we have it here.