Tommy Mooney is gunning for his old club Southend tomorrow - and hoping he can carry on his good record at Roots Hall.

Oxford United's leading scorer, who got back on the goal trail against Cheltenham last week, was with the Essex club for less than a season about 11 years ago.

But he made quite an impact then, including scoring a hat-trick against Oxford.

"That was my first league hat-trick, so I obviously remember it," he said. "It was when Barry Fry was there, but he left at the end of November.

"Peter Taylor came in and I only played a few times for him and then went on loan to Watford, and it was Watford from then on.

"Barry Fry was quite something as a manager. We were third in the first division then and had he stayed, we might have gone up.

"When you leave a club you always want to do well when you go back and I've got a good record going back there, though I don't want to put the mockers on that! I've played a couple of times and got a couple of goals.

"Southend will be a tough game for us. They've scored a lot of goals this season and got another four goals the other night, but they can't keep scoring goals.

"Hopefully they'll find their regular form and we'll be able to beat them. We're going there in a very positive mood and want to win the game."

Mooney's winner against Cheltenham was his fifth goal of the season, but he had been expecting more.

"You come to a place with certain expectations, but nobody could put any more pressure on me than I put on myself.

"I felt I had been unlucky a few times not to have scored. All you can do is keep hitting the target."

Playing Mooney and Lee Bradbury up front, with Steve Basham just behind, is starting to look very effective, and Mooney feels it's only a matter of time before the results come Oxford's way on a regular basis.

"It worked very well at Macclesfield and especially so at Northampton, I thought," he said.

"We didn't play as well last Saturday as we had the previous two games, but we got the win and that's what mattered.

Mooney chuckled at how different a player he is now to when he first went to Southend from Scarborough more than a decade ago.

"I was a young lad coming down to London," he said. "I was a bit of a pussycat at the time, but with all that experience and about 500 league games under my belt, I'm a bit wiser now."