LO third successive defeat.... that's about as bad as it gets so far for them bad patch's where teams in bottom 12 took advantage! Brentford w2 d 1 lost 4 wolves w 2 d 5 lost 4 peterb w 1 d 1 lost 4 Rotherham w 1 d 4 lost 5 PNE not really had a bad patch Its the first time this season it has fallen for us playing a team out of form! 2 more wins required for Feb
If we can beat Tranmere that will be 10 points from February from 5 games and Sheff U away still to come. If we could take something there it would set us up for big games against Gillingham (H) Shrewsbury (A) Peterborough (A) Swindon (H) and Colchester (A) and Port Vale (H) in March. If we can take 12 points or more from those 6 games we'll be in with a good chance of survival but we can't be complacent as many teams around us have games in hand on us. As an example Crawley have 6 games in hand over us The big games in April are Notts Co (H) Stevenage (A) and Crewe (H) all in a row
Crawley do have 6 games in hand but to be honest, in their position I would be pretty worried.- There are only 12 Saturdays left to the end of the season. We have 15 games to go which means 3 midweek. Crawley have 21 to play. With 12 Saturdays, they will be playing midweek as well pretty much every week, and that, assuming they have no more postponements. That sort of fixture pile up is bound to have an effect on their squad
I mentioned this the other day, do they have strong enough squads for these games? Plus we are assuming that they will win their games in hand
The only thing that will take us to safety is to win over and over again and last night was hopefully a step in the right direction. We cannot guess what the other teams might do because I am sure they were all expecting us to fail at Orient based on form and looked what happened. Looking at the future fixture list may very well give us a comfortable feeling but if you want a real warm fuzzy feeling then win the games and let the rest sort themselves out without including us.
2 THINGS HAPPENED LAST NIGHT We scored first against a team who are in a bad patch. thats a psychology aspect normally applying to us, and played a loose 4 3 3! 4 at the back was what the players asked for? orient 16 pts from 18 then none from 9! they might do a peterbro and drop to bottom of top 6, 3000 gates?
