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Although a nice thought – if this season becomes a success, we may never need to play yesterday’s opponents again…

SW19 is back, 24 hours later than originally scheduled**, and back for the inevitable collapse post-January push for the playoffs.

** – was stuck in Newark, NJ for an extra day as the flight I was on got cancelled because the engine monitoring system failed. Thankfully, they discovered that before I got off the ground…

And it’s a return off the 0-0 at the Frenzydome – a result that has left me a little, well, meh.

Obviously, you want to win and win big in this particular fixture (and while it is a rivalry, it’s not a derby).

But I’ll take this outcome. A point on the road is always good, especially in this unique fixture.

Is it true that the Frenzies were treating this like a victory? At least the tables have properly turned now from even just a couple of years ago.

Come to think of it – wasn’t it around this time last year that we went to Stadium:MT and put in yet another humiliation?

That was the bottle job too far, and I don’t find it a surprise our whole attitude to this fixture changed after that.

It worked, didn’t it? To the point where we have a scoreless draw yesterday and I’m slightly disappointed with it.

The game itself sounded nothing to write home about, precious little action by all accounts, although Sam Hutchinson seemed to be the player most talked about (in a good way).

Over 1200 of us there, putting up a rearguard action against their legion upon legion of empty seats sitting there all menacing and stationary.

Seriously, and leaving aside our own prejudices against them for a minute – it really has to be a shit existence watching games there regularly.

You can liken them to clubs like Crawley, or Fleetwood, or Harrogate, but at least those three are legitimate and have a “soul” to them.

Now more than ever, they’ve not got anything behind the shiny facade. And even that’s not particularly shiny any more.

We move on though, and in a period lasting from yesterday until next Saturday, we have three games in total.

The one we had yesterday is probably the least important of the three in terms of what happens this season.

I forgot that we were at Crewe on Tuesday (blame the jetlag) but that suddenly becomes the most important game of the season.

Then we host Bradford back at PL, another fixture I’ll be very happy if we come through victorious.

The next week won’t make us promoted, nor would it even put us out of the running. But we could do ourselves some huge favours.

Finally, the transfer window shuts a week tomorrow, and I’d be happy to see very little movement from us.

Maybe another striker and Piggy going back to east London, if given an option, but if nothing else happens then I’ll be OK with that.

Obviously, we really don’t want to lose the likes of Stevens this window, and to the club’s credit it does look like we’ll make a run for promotion this campaign.

Signing Hutchinson and Browne (and having that funded by John Green kind-of answers the whole debate over how the club should be funding going forward) isn’t a bad statement of intent from us.

And if we come out of this window unscathed – and perhaps even improved – then you hope the faith is then justified.

We don’t “deserve” the playoffs, or even automatic promotion, because that has to be earned over the course of the next nineteen games or so.

But we’re up there by right at the moment, and even just extending our season is a real possibility at the moment.

I’m not going to say we’ll repeat the run under Ardley in 2016 where we suddenly became world class instead of world crass, although that would be nice.

And if we did then we’d be champions by Easter.

But right now I like to think everyone at the club can look at what we’ve got and decide we’re capable of making a real go of it.

We may yet fail, we may even finish tenth, but we’ve underachieved too much in recent seasons so it’s time we rectified that.

And one final little possibly nice thought – assuming we keep it up, and they don’t do their own run the second half of the season, at least we should be spared having to face them in the playoffs…

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