We are collecting more plaudits than points at the moment - and that concerns me.

Of course, it is good to hear pundits like Phil Neville praise the team for their performance at Manchester United but the top line, bottom line and everything in between is that we lost.

Points on the board is what every manager looks for and we haven’t picked up as many as we should have. We have seven from six games but with more clinical finishing and better defending at the other end, we could and should have almost doubled our tally.

To be honest, I don’t do praise or criticism, really. I just try and do the job for which I’m paid.

As a young player, I would scan the Sunday papers, looking to see how many marks out of 10 I’d been given but as time moves on you become less bothered by those things and more concerned with what the manager thinks about your performances.

You come to realise that both praise and criticism come with a health warning. Too much of one and you can lose your confidence; a surfeit of the other can go to your head.

The same thing happened when I was a fledging manager. Criticism became hard to take and praise, when and if it came, sometimes became a distraction. You soon found out to your cost that, if you eased off, your players soon followed suit.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s always good to hear nice things said about you or your team but the reality is that, if you have 10 good things said about you and one bad thing, you’ll remember the bad thing. That’s human nature for you. My focus now is how to convert those good performances into more positive results? I want my players to think about what they could do better, to remember that football is a team game, out of possession as well as in it.

Yes, we’ve impressed a lot of people but we’ve not managed to carve out one clean sheet in six games and that has to stop without compromising our attacking ability.

I’ve heard and seen that Teddy Sheringham, our forwards coach, has been given much of the credit for our offensive improvement. That’s natural and we have plenty of time for Teddy to make the players even better. It’s good to have him here and leave him with that responsibility but it’s not right to single out any individual - everyone here takes an equal share of the credit and the criticism and that’s how it should be. Teddy is enjoying it at the club, though, and we’re enjoying having him. He brings us something else - it’s a nice fit.

People have also assumed that we went looking for a different type of player in the summer. That’s not quite accurate. What were searching for was better players and sometimes things evolve quickly and not as you have anticipated.

Alex Song, for example, was not on our radar when we began our recruitment programme but then, lo and behold, in early August, we heard that he wanted to return to the Premier League and would consider coming to West Ham.

What we did then as a club, from top to bottom, was make Alex feel that this was the place to come.

Enner Valencia is another case in point. He wasn’t at the top of our list because we didn’t think we had any chance of getting him. Diafra Sakho was a similar case because Metz had just won promotion and we didn’t believe they would sell.

In the end, though, once all the business is done, you don’t know how things will gel. The biggest plus for me and a real pleasant surprise, is how quickly they have settled in - all nine of them.

Before the season I was veering towards tightening things up defensively because players such as Sakho, Valencia, Cheikh Kouyate and Mauro Zarate would, I thought, find it a struggle early on. But they have hit the ground running in a better way than many other clubs’ new signings.