MY philosophy has always been to play football in the right way.

My players will work hard and be well prepared for a fixture.

In an ideal world, I look to play a passing style of game where every department from defence, midfield to striker gets a touch of the ball before it goes in the back of the net.

But we all know that it does not work like that in all football matches.

When Saturday comes, you have another 11 players who are trying to combat your style of play so sometimes you have to adapt.

And sometimes the opposition and the way they set up dictates your style of play.

On Saturday, Gillingham came here and put nine behind the ball in a 4-5-1 system. It made it difficult for us to get a passing game going in our own third and the mid third of the pitch where they had most of their players.

It meant we had to bypass our two central midfield players O’Neil Thompson and James McQuilkin and get it into our front three as quickly as we could to try to exploit Gillingham in other areas where they were weak.

You have to set up differently in League 2 to the way you do in the Championship.

When I was at Barnsley, every week we were up against a huge club and you become more reactive to the opposition.

This year, I’m trying to be more proactive and get teams to react to us.

We are setting up our system and style of play to try to beat teams with what we are good at.

We have three strikers so we are playing with three strikers; we have a wide player so we are playing with a wide player.

Sometimes it does not work and we will have to adapt during the game – at Crewe, we started with that system, got our noses in front and then got a little overrun in midfield so we had to react to them.

We changed to three midfield players and won the game – part of being a manager is to react to the opposition but we are trying to ensure that teams worry about us rather than us worrying about them.

I would probably have preferred to have won the home game and drawn away, and to have a better performance than we had at home on Saturday.

But there are 46 games in a season and you are not going to play well in all of them.

A sign of a good side is when you can grind out a result and get a point, or three, when you have not performed to the level you want to.

On Saturday, we did not perform to the level that I expect but we have come away with a point and a clean sheet.

Four points out of six is a decent return, we are joint third and have plenty to build on.