Like every Gillingham fan, I was delighted with Bradley Dack agreeing a new three-year contract with the club.

I’m pleased for Bradley as he has a big future ahead of him. He has a good attitude and his work ethic is exceptional – that is what is going to carry anyone on who wants to be successful in this game.

I remember early on in pre-season when we suddenly saw Bradley in action and he could get the ball on the half-turn and always hit the target when he got his shot off – he stood out a mile.

When we took over at Gillingham, it was like we had signed 20 new players, as they were at the club when we arrived. We knew many of the players but we didn’t actually know them that well, so we did our due diligence on the homegrown players.

We had a criteria that we went through to see how they would fit with us, similar in a way to the film Moneyball. That film is about a sophisticated way of analysing and scouting baseball players.

What we did was to look at the stats of the players, in terms of how many games they played and started, how many games they’ve won, points collected, whether they’ve been in teams that have won promotion or got into the play-offs – we got an overall picture of the players we were inheriting.

With Bradley Dack, we had a midfielder who had scored 27 goals in the youth team and that set alarm bells ringing for us – as in that’s brilliant – and that was a massive tick for sure.

t’s always nice to look at the papers on a Sunday morning when you are top of the table.

We know it doesn’t mean anything yet, but it does show that we are moving in the right direction. It’s a nice shot in the arm to be there as we’re all trying to do the best we can.

The draw against Chesterfield was definitely a point gained in my book. They are an exceptional team and as I said last week, it’s always difficult playing a side when they don’t have a permanent manager.

Crawley scored a couple of exceptional strikes against us on Tuesday but we also scored two good goals of our own. The lads that came into the side acquitted themselves well and it shows that we’ve got a squad that can move the club forward.

We travel to Barnet this weekend and while they are bottom of the league, that’s irrelevant to us. We’ll look at their strengths and weaknesses and see how we can stop them but it doesn’t bother us whether they’ve won, drawn or lost their last couple of games.