Hi everyone,
I've been away with Wales in the early part of this week, and it was nice to gain a positive result by defeating iceland 3-1 in our friendly at the Cardiff City Stadium.
It was an important game as we build towards qualification for Euro 2016 and I was happy to score my second goal for my country, heading our opener in the first half.
I hope that this can be the time Wales qualify for a major tournament. If we can keep a fully-fit squad and a first eleven out there every game, we should have a good chance.
We played Belgium in the qualifying campaign just gone and they are a world class team. People are tipping them to go quite far in the World Cup, so that is going to be a tough game.
But we drew 1-1 there in the last game of World Cup qualifying and gave them a hell of a game, so we know we can perform against them.
Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey are obviously world class players, and the boys playing for Swansea are having the experience of playing in Europe, which will be a massive help for us.
They're playing against a different style of opposition, which will be good for the first team. It's a very exciting time, especially for an old man like me!
I have been one of the older heads in the squad for a couple of years now, which speaks volumes for the standard of players that we're producing. You can see that with Gareth and Aaron Ramsey, so it's an exciting time and I want to try and hang onto it as long as I can.
As for West Ham, our defensive form has been fantastic recently. We did have a lot of injuries in key areas earlier in the season, Winston was out and Big Andy was out too. We don't like to use that as an excuse, but it did affect us a little bit. We knew that when we had everyone back fit and competing for places our results would pick up, and to get four wins on the bounce has picked our season up massively.
It's going well, there's the odd game when we've conceded three or four, which is going to happen with the quality of centre forwards in the Premier League but we're defending well and the goalkeeper behind us has been on fire in the last couple of weeks as well.
We've got 13 clean sheets at the moment and hopefully we can get many more before the end of the season - starting with Stoke a week on Saturday.
Come on you Irons
Ginge