The sun's shining, the pitches looking threadbare, fans up and down the country anxiously looking at league tables, working out if we win this, and they lose that, we can jump up a couple of places.

Yes, it's March and we're nearing the end of the season, when there'll be the enforced starvation diet of no football with our favourite team. And of course, people have started speculating about who we can add to the squad for next year, and who we can wave a P45 at in front of their noses.

The truth is our defence is too fragile for us to even guarantee that we will still be in the Brown Bubbly Championship. A couple more injuries and we could go on a losing run scoring two or three goals but letting in more. We've got nine games to go and logic dictates that we should get the two wins and a draw necessary for survival. The perverse thing is though, many of the teams below us have decided to make a fight of it (apart from the Addicks who look well doomed), and 53 points may not be enough.

Clough himself pointed that out before the defeat at Bramall Lane: “Usually, they say 50 points will keep you up but we think it will be more than that. But we've got ourselves into a position where, with 10 games to go, a couple of wins and a draw takes us to that 53-point mark, which we hope will be enough.” It may not be.

So it is imperative that we stop shipping goals and keep scoring. Easier said than done – as often it is said you defend as a team and you attack as a team. Attacking as a team will no doubt win us some games as shown by the dramatic increase in our points tally since Clough arrived. Good defence, though, is not just about individuals but about collective responsibility.

I think this is where we have fallen down dramatically this season. Where are the two banks of four closing down the last third of the pitch? Far too often, it has been left to an hapless individual to try and stop a faster or cleverer opponent exploiting a weakness and failing miserably, ending in the dreary inevitability of a goal to be added to the goals against column.

Fans may suggest this or that player for next season but if we don't sort out the organisation of our defence and keep the ball better – something that we lost quite often against Southampton - there will be no point in importing new players only to see the same mistakes being made.

The Italians understand that almost instinctively – they hero-worship their defenders – all the kids on the block want to be Scirea, Baresi, Maldini, Cannavaro, Costacurta etc. Not for them the tiresome prancing of a Ronaldo (the UK version), the injury-ravaged silky skills of Torres, or the wayward scintillating power of Drogba. And they understand that football is a collective game in which the individual is subsumed into a whole.

This is what we are still struggling with – becoming a team as a whole and not eleven individuals. Clough himself commented on it in the excellent interview by Steve Nicholson. Apparently much focus is on improving the cohesiveness of the players which may explain why certain individuals, although talented, are not considered for selection even for the bench unless those higher up in the reckoning are injured.

The two loans both indicate that Clough's team are dissatisfied with certain personnel and while we still need bodies for the rest of the season, I would guess that those individuals will be the first to go in the close season, no matter their individual skills, and those who subscribe to the new regime's philosophy of working as part of a overall unit will stay until someone better is recruited.

Of course, if we falter badly and find ourselves saying goodbye to the Brown Bubbly Championship, then all of this is likely to change. And I, along with many other fans, fervently hope that is not going to be the case.

Photo: Action Images via Reuters