Proper six pointer

Win tomorrow and we go 10 points clear of 4th from bottom Harrogate lose and the gap dwindles to four points a must not lose match in my eyes

We likely need 7/8 points from 18 games to stay up. Can we pack this in?

It's not though is it? Would be disappointing to lose but in no way is it a 'must not lose' game.

I tend to agree. It’s not gonna decide anything but we need to beat them. If anything, we owe them one after they turned us over in January, due to our own shortcomings more than anything. Win, and we can look upwards. Lose, and it’s a psychological blow as much as anything. They’re my local team. My son was born in Harrogate so that’s his team and rightly so (means I pay close attention) but they are eminently beatable if we exploit their weaknesses. They’re good going forward and they have some technically gifted players including Armstrong and Muldoon who are a threat but they ‘overpass’…..they go sideways and backwards without incision, they are disorganised at the back, they lack physicality, they leave huge spaces in wide positions, especially on the break, so we must capitalise. If we dither and don’t show up, they’ll hurt us.  

Quoted from Rodley Mariner

It's not though is it? Would be disappointing to lose but in no way is it a 'must not lose' game.

Surely every match should be treat as a must not lose game, no one ever won anything thinking its okay to lose the odd game!

I'm a right drama queen but even I'm now 100% confident we won't go down

Quoted from Azimuth

Surely every match should be treat as a must not lose game, no one ever won anything thinking its okay to lose the odd game!

We going to do this thread every match then?

Christ what an overeaction

Come on, let’s just thoroughly de-bunk this idea that we face any tangible threat of relegation this season. Results on Saturday, not least Town’s, really improved the complexion of things.

For the sake of the argument, I’m going to assume Rochdale are down, or at the very least won’t be catching us - they’d need to pick up 16 more points than us to do so, with 4 fewer games to play.

Assuming no swings in goal difference for simplicity, for Town to get relegated ALL of the following would have to happen as an absolute minimum:

- Crewe pick up 1 more points than us with 2 fewer games
- Colchester pick up 2 more points than us with 5 fewer games
- Newport pick up 2 more points than us with 2 fewer games
- Gillingham pick up 7 more points than us with 2 fewer games
- Harrogate pick up 8 more points than us with 2 fewer games
- Hartlepool pick up 10 more points than us with 4 fewer games
- Crawley pick up 13 more points than us with 1 fewer game

As long as any one of those things doesn’t happen, we are safe. For it to even come close, we’d have to absolutely stink out our last 18 games, and there’s just no evidence to suggest we’ll do that.

Whilst we’ve not had a great run of form since the Autumn, we’ve never really gone long periods not picking up points. We’ve played 28 games so far, so if we split that up into 4 equal quarters our respective points total is as follows:

Q1 - 12
Q2 - 11
Q3 - 4
Q4 - 9

Alright, so we’ve certainly not been as good recently as we were in the first half of our games so far this season, but if we take our average PPG from our last, slightly underwhelming 14, and extrapolate across our remaining 18 matches, we’d hit a projected 52.7 points.

Personally, I think we’re capable of doing better than that, especially given we appear to be approaching a fully fit squad for the first time this season.

But we won’t need to. Too many teams who are demonstrably poorer than us need to do substantially better than us, and they won’t.

A win tomorrow night would be welcome, not just because it makes one of the above variables even more unlikely but because I do think we’re better than Harrogate. If we lose though, it will be frustrating, annoying even, but not a disaster.

We’re not going down, nor will we find ourselves close to doing so.

Excellent analysis Poojah. I anticipate the last 6-8 games of the season will see us both safe and unable to hit the play offs. Something that we haven't had whilst Hurst has been in sole charge (I think!?).

These games should reveal a lot about his plans for next season. Who is being released. Formations. Who will play the 10 role. Can Taylor give us another season.