Our 6-0 win over Birmingham City in the Worthington Cup has been followed by three matches in the league without a win - the worst spell Manchester City have had this season.

But if we think it's bad now, the worst could be that if we let it go another three or four games without getting the results then we will have the City fans on our backs. So while we do think it's hard now, we need to make sure we do something about it so that it doesn't get any worse.

You need the 30-odd thousand fans behind you supporting you all the way. What you don't want is that feeling when every time the ball comes and you make a mistake, you want the ground to open and swallow you up.

We can't just wait for things to happen and for the manager to put it right. We, as players, have to ask ourselves not what the team can do for us, but what we can do extra for the team.

That's when we each need to dissect our games and say `ok, this is where I'm letting the boys down, I need to work on that'. But, like I said last week in this column, there isn't the time to do that. And we have another game tonight against Grimsby.

I'm one who likes to look at videos of our games and dissect my performance and look at where I can work on things in training. But with games coming thick and fast you can talk about it and look at it on video as a team but not have much time to do anything about it. I like to look at my bits of action again and again and try to improve.

Since beating Birmingham, we have drawn 2-2 with Stockport, 0-0 with Sheffield United and lost 2-1 to Preston who were deserving of the three points on Sunday. That's disappointing. The last two home games drawn means four points lost.

The ideal formula for promotion is to win most of your home games and pick up the odd win and draw away from home. But this is probably the worst spell we've had because we are not picking up maximum points at home or anything away from home.

What's needed now is for the fans to get behind us to make that `extra player' because we need to scrape any sort of win. A good run can come from a 1-0 result from a scrappy game where you wonder `how did we win that game'. Then when you look back on it, you realise that you've been on a run since that game.

In the Sheffield United match, they came and really frustrated us in that from the first five minutes balls were going out for throw-ins and they were walking up, taking their time and there was no urgency about their play.

They had two former City players in their team, their player-coach Keith Curle who left before I joined the club, and Michael Brown who left a couple of seasons ago. Curle was a crowd favourite, he had been here for many years.

Looking back on the game, their plan was to frustrate us and kill the game. There were a lot of stoppages so that we couldn't get into any rhythm of play. From the first five minutes, if the ball was out of play five yards from them they would walk and pick it up. You would have thought the referee would pick up on this and say `come on, let's have some urgency or I'm going to book one or two of you'.

On that night we got a referee who seemed to ignore our crowd, especially when we reached somewhere around 70 minutes.

The fans were having a go at their players for taking their time, it was at the stage that we wanted to press on.

Curle was a former player and he knew that if we didn't get set into a pattern of play that the crowd would get frustrated and that would get to the players. When we went down to 10 men when Kevin Horlock got sent off, we actually played better than during the previous 70 minutes.

In the Preston game on Sunday, they did to us what we are expected to do to other teams, in that when they had the ball they played good football and when they didn't have the ball they pressurised us.

At this time we're not full of confidence so our passing game isn't quite going. We're also not pressurising to force other teams to give the ball back to us. As a result, teams are starting to gain confidence and think they can play us off the park, so to speak.

In all fairness, Preston didn't change their game plan and put a man on Ali Bernarbia as a few teams have done. They stuck to their plan and all credit to them.

Everyone is looking at the tables and seeing the gap between us and the leaders and that means more hard work ahead. No one, at any club, wants to be playing in the play-offs unless that club's goal is to get into the play-offs.

For a club like Man City, it's not about getting into the play-offs, we're looking higher than that. But as the gap is getting bigger, the fans' patience is getting shorter.

If you look at the structure of some of the clubs you could say that there are eight to a dozen clubs who are more than suited for the Premiership . . . and have been there.

The only thing we might have over the majority of them is the fan base. A lot of those clubs can go out and spend anything from five to 10 million pounds on new players and that's why it becomes even harder.

Two of the top eight clubs, Crystal Palace and Portsmouth, just missed out on relegation last season. They've invested a bit of money on new players and if you get yourself a few wins then the players have the belief.

No matter what level you play at, if you have the belief and confidence you can compete with the best teams and do a job. Once you have that belief, there's no stopping you and that's what we're lacking at this time.