Paulo Wanchope is set to return to the first team for our game against Preston at the weekend and that could mean that Darren Huckerby or I might find ourselves warming the bench.

Paulo has been away with the Costa Rican team that made it to the final of the Gold Cup last week, but our manager, Kevin Keegan has said he was so unhappy at our performance in the 2-1 loss to Wimbledon on Saturday that he is going to bring him straight back into the side.

If Paulo starts and the manager decides I have to drop down to the bench then I have to respect his decision.

I am not one who thinks that because I have scored 28 goals it entitles me to start. I am not that arrogant and certainly don't think `there's no way he will drop me'. If that happens all I can do is prove I am worthy of keeping the shirt when he picks me again.

Every time we train I try to prove my worth to the manager. If you have one or two good games and don't have that attitude you can fall into the trap of thinking you don't have anything to work on. That's when you can go on to have a run of bad games.

By having something to prove in every training session and every game the manager will see and hopefully judge me on that.

You may have read that he accused us of having no passion when he addressed the reporters at the end of our game on Sunday and those comments were along the lines of what he told us.

We can have no excuse for the way we played. Instead of travelling down in a coach from Manchester we flew down and the manager even changed our hotel because he was not happy with the size of the rooms we had the last time we played in London.

Some people might have thought the pitch was not conducive to our style of football but it is like that for both teams. It was just a case of us not playing at the same level as we had been in the previous two games when we beat Ipswich 4-1 in the FA Cup and then went on to beat Millwall 2-0 in the league after we had a man sent off after just seven minutes.

Although we are still clear at the top it is only by three points and teams behind us will have seen us slip up and will be thinking they have chance to make up the ground.

We cannot really be bothered about what other sides are doing. At this moment there is still a long way to go and everything is in our own hands. There are 16 games to go yet and there is no guarantee that any of those teams at the top now will be there at the end of the season.

Because we are at the top now, promotion is ours to lose. We just have to put a good run together and get as many points as we can from our next seven or eight games and then see where we and our opposition are.

That run must start with our next game against Preston at Maine Road on Sunday.

It is a local derby as Preston is only 50 minutes away from Manchester. When we played there earlier in the season we took more than 3,000 fans and unfortunately we lost 2-1.

Of all the teams we have played in the First Division I think they are the best. They didn't change their system because they were playing City as many teams do. They played their same players in the same system and went out to play their own way.

We will have our crowd right behind us and that will be a help but we have to get a win to regain whatever confidence may have been lost from the Wimbledon game.

We know they are a good team and often that is what you need - after you have had a bad performance you need to play a decent team, get a good result, get back to where you were and look forward to the next game. Hopefully, come Sunday night that's what will have happened.