WHEN it’s your birthday at the club, you’re supposed to bring some treats in for the lads.

On Thursday, the lads were all asking Michael Brown ‘where’s the donuts? Where’s the cakes?’ and Browny said: ‘just wait - I’ve got something special coming’.

We were just finishing training and then we heard the music of the ice cream van from the car park – he’d hired one to come and it was fantastic.

We all indulged. I had an ice cream and I think even the chairman had a 99. It was a pretty unique way for him to celebrate his 39th birthday and everyone enjoyed it.

I’ve never coached a player that age before but Browny’s a fantastic professional. He’s just got back into the squad and he’s doing great to still be playing first team football at 39.

The transfer window ends after the weekend and I think that it can be a pretty hectic time if you’re trying desperately to keep hold of your best players or to bring people in.

Luckily for us, we managed to do our business quite early on in the window by bringing in two very good players (Matty Kennedy and Theo Robinson) and we’ve not lost anyone that we weren’t happy to let go.

We’ve also tried to manoeuvre things for one or two players to go out on loan but we’re lucky that it’s not been too stressful at all for us.

Everybody knows the rules and knows how long the window is, so you just deal with it, but you still see business being done right at the end.

We’ve been preparing to play Wigan but they’ve just gone and made two good signings (Sam Morsy and Ryan Colclough) so that might change things for us. Will they play?

Swindon are playing Barnsley and they’ve just signed Jak McCourt, who we had earlier this season.

I like Jak. I first saw him when he was playing at Torquay with my lad Bill and we had injuries to two key midfielders when he came to us but he did very well.

We saw him as one for the future and I was a bit surprised to see him only sign until the end of the season at Barnsley but there’s an option for it to be longer and if it gets to the summer and they don’t want to keep him, they can make sure they get a fee for him.

Barnsley have been doing really well and it just shows what can happen when you keep faith in a manager, because Lee (Johnson) had to have come close to leaving.

When we beat them earlier in the season, they’d already lost five in a row and that made it six, and we did think that it might end up being his last game.