Cautiously Pessimistic

Well, the game away to Biggleswade certainly showed us a few things.  The first of which was Biggleswade itself.  I don't think I've ever seen Poppies play there on anything but a Tuesday night.  It's fair to say that daylight is not as flattering as floodlight. 

Secondly, Holman's seeming disinterest at being played as an outright centre forward continues.  One would have thought that in O'Connor's absence Dan would have grasped his chance at being the main cutting edge of the team and run riot.  No riot.  Very little running.  Disappointing.

Biggleswade offered next to nothing, but for all of our possession and huff & puff I don't recall their goalie doing anything special to repel us.

Even being 8-points clear, nothing is certain.  With typical Poppies-pessimism you can look over the remaining fixtures and other than today's game with a deflated St Neots*, you can see each of the teams we are to face putting up very stern tests, whilst Stourbridge's run-in, from a NN16 postcode looks like a succession of gimme's.

Look who's lining up to thrash our stuttering heroes!

St Neots (H) - fighting to beat us to try to stay up
Leiston (A) - fighting to complete a double over us
Alvechurch (H) - fighting to be in play-offs
Halesowen (A) - fighting to stay up in front of a large home support
Barwell (H) - fighting to stay up and put one over our large group of  Barwell rejects
AFC Scum-lite (A) - fighting for play-offs and to justify their existence by beating us
Stratford (H) - fighting for play-offs and defending Shakespeare's honour after my not studying him well at school.


And now, it has been proved via Facebook that even though we have the highest average attendance in this division, and, at time of writing, the 49th highest average attendance outside of the Football League, our gates as a percentage of our population are very small.  6th bottom of our division in fact.  More cause for pessimism, were it not for the fact that this table had pinned our town's population as 93,000.  Wow, that's big.  Some 30,000+ more than the actual population in fact.  Has our population been added to that of Kettering, Ohio?

A quick trip to Wikipedia later and it seems that every other team in this survey has their population based on the town in question, while ours seems to include the entire Borough.  Seems a smidgen unfair, and not a level playing field, surely.  Speaking of which, off to Latimer Park....!





* entirely my fault if I jinx this one....