MY BEARD has gone past the itchy stage now and I’m not even halfway.

I’ve been growing it for over eight weeks now and it’s doing my nut in. It’s starting to attach to my chest hair now!

I’ve never had a beard this long before and my wife is going mental. She hates it.

It’s going to be massive by the time I stop for my 30th birthday in December – I’ll probably look like Roy Keane by then!

But it’s all for a good cause helping the “G man”, our kitman John Duckworth. All the money raised is going to his Bantamstrek charity group for Macmillan Cancer and the Bradford Burns Unit.

The lads are looking forward to the Barnsley game and hopefully we can keep our fantastic away record going in front of the TV cameras.

It was great to be back last week with a win. I’d only trained four days before the Crewe game so it was nice that I could get through without any problems.

When you are injured, it’s so important that you look after yourself. If you don’t, then it’s a lot harder to come back because your fitness isn’t right.

There was a bit of pressure on us because we hadn’t been winning at home.

Crewe aren’t a bad team but they didn’t play great against us. But as I always say, anyone is capable of beating us if we aren’t on our game.

But I thought we did well, we passed the ball, kept patient and broke them down in the end.

All we wanted to do was to get the win and I never for a minute thought that we wouldn’t do that.

For us defenders, the clean sheet was very important. We stayed switched on and kept the back door firmly locked.

They were only going to score from breakaways on us and I thought we limited them to shooting from the edge of the box.

Getting that first home clean sheet was so important. We have to get back to making sure that teams coming to Valley Parade don’t score an easy goal.

We’ve conceded quite a few from corners but the manager’s nailed that down and we’re looking strong back there.