Cook won't be fooled by plaudits

It’s been a near-perfect start to the campaign for Cook and Latics, who won three and drawn one of their four League One matches before being halted by the international break.

With a game in hand, Latics are three points off the top of the fledgling table, with every opposition manager having so far having tipped Cook’s men for promotion.

The wily 50-year-old, however, is keepoing his feet firmly on the ground.

“We’re doing okay, we’re doing okay, to be fair,” he told the Observer.

“We’ve been getting a lot of plaudits, which I think sometimes can be a bad thing.

“I genuinely believe people are saying nice things about us to lull us into a false security of security.

“We know we’ve got so much hard work ahead of us as a club.

“We want to be successful, and to be successful you must work hard.

“As anyone up and down the country will tell you. there’s certainly no trophies being handed out in August, September and October.

“We’ll be like everyone else, working as hard as we can towards the winter, remaining as strong and as disciplined as we can, to look to get the points we need for the latter months to get us where we want to be.”

Despite two red cards in the first four league matches - Callum Elder against MK Dons and Chey Dunkley against Portsmouth - Cook does not feel there is a discipline problem.

“If you look at the sendings-off in both games – they came at a period when we were 1-0 up, and very much in the ascendancy,” the Latics boss assessed.

“When you look at our team, it is very young, they haven’t got the masses of league games you might think are in there – certainly the two lads who have been sent off.

“You have to tread carefully in football, and you can’t be helping teams to get a foothold into a game, when we’re just about to take control.

“This is a learning curve for us all, and the players must learn from it, that’s for sure.

“Certainly discipline is one of our strong points – that’s what we want to be aiming for.

“We don’t want to be having men sent off from week to week, we don’t want to give referees decisions to make.

“I know managers can be very critical of referees, but we’ve also got to help them.”