Reading has some games that they can win coming up, as well. Their close is tough, though...final eight games of the year include Blackpool, West Ham, Leeds, Brighton, Birmingham, and ourselves.
We'll be five points ahead of them again come tomorrow evening. If sides want automatic promotion, then winning your home games is a minimum. So tonight's result doesn't concern me.
Four consecutive clean sheets for them, as well. Still, they have the same question mark as Middlesbrough did earlier in the year...are those 1-0 victories going to be there for the rest of the year, or are they going to turn into 0-0 or 1-1 draws? Roberts has been a big addition for them, and their defense is fantastic, but they are walking the knife's edge to some extent; five of their last six wins were by one goal.
Yeh but we'll have played an extra game. If everyone wins their games in hand there will be six teams within four points of us, all of these are certainley in the automatic promotion race no doubt.
For tommorow I think Punch should play, Guly is good but I think punch is a better all round player and was unlucky to be dropped as hes been fantastic since his return.
That's the important word. Give me points on the board over games in hand any day. And besides, as I've already said this week, our next six fixtures look very nice. If we take advantage of them to the extent that we really should be doing, then we'll come out of them in a ver good position regardless of what those around us are doing.
Only problem with that is that if you look at Saints, we have only won two games with a margin of 2 goals since mid-November (or whenever Brighton at SMS was). So all our results have been draws, one goal margin wins, or losses. So really we have the same potential problem. Not many clean sheets amongst ours. I knew Roberts was going to do well, and he scores in 1-0 victories, which is seriously valuable. I wish there weren't three of the four chasers in red hot form. Hope Reading's run-in does for them.
Actually, post-Brighton we have only four wins in Championship play, but three of them were by multi-goal margins...2-0 over Burnley, 3-0 over Forest, 2-0 over Palace. That's during our downswing, as well; overall, 11 of our 16 league wins have been by two goals or more. Reading has the same win total, but have won by more than one goal only 5 times in 16. Which was the point I was trying to make; Reading are picking up points in bunches at the moment, but they aren't blowing teams away, and haven't been all season.
Not sure the one - nil margain against hammering a side is really relevant. Its the three points that count and in a lot of cases (Utd) last season, grinding out 1-0 wins is a mark of champions. I understand that if they start turning into 1-1 or 0-0 it will slow them down, but at the same time they could just be building momentum and could turn the 1-0's into 2-0 or 3-0. I think its going to be very tight but hopefully we are out of our suspect patch and can start putting a winning run together and try and get some clear daylight between us and the chasing pack. Teams down to about 7th are all in with a shout for automatic promotion so, unless we can put a run together the playoffs aren't a given.
This. The margin of a win only really counts towards goal difference. Can be worth an extra point but that's about it. I would happily take 1-0 wins till the end of the season. Clean sheets are what show the strength of a team and Reading have had a lot recently and players capable of scoring.
seriously, people are worried about reading winning at home? theres four team realistically chasing us for second place and you cant expect every one of them to slip up every week. baring in mind theyve also won 8 out of 10 seems to suggest they may have some bad form to come. also looking at their run in, it could be so.
Looks like I won't be listening in this week [bugger it] as there's work on the near horizon. Might still be around by 3pm, but I doubt it. Good luck to Saints today [they don't need it, but I'm sending oodles of it anyway], and if I don't say before I go, have a great day, Pepys.
Saints Team: Davis; Harding, Fonte, Hooiveld, Fox; Chaplow, Cork, Schneiderlin, Lallana; Lambert, Sharp. Subs: Martin, Hammond, Puncheon, Connolly, Lee. Guly misses out through illness.
With Frazer out, who's today's temporary stand-in keeper, should Davis be successfully preyed upon by Derby..?
