Tombwfc

I thought we were great today. It's one thing dominating Wigan and not winning, but if you play like that against the Champions you deserve a lot of credit. Famous last words, but I can't see a side beating us over two legs in the playoffs. And then Wembley will be a lottery - we played a team miles better than us last year and won 4-0.

If we beat Bristol we're one point behind on the same games, which is nothing. Nobody would be counting their chickens if we were one point ahead of them. For as long as we're within two points we can force them to keep winning and that's very difficult at this time of year (particularly away from home). Most bookies have us around evens for promotion (which I assume includes the playoffs). That feels about right to me. Not favourites, but it wouldn't take a miracle for us to get in.

Would we have gotten a result in the same circumstances? Defending well and taking your chances is all part of the game.

Could've been better, could've been worse. A lot is going to happen in these next five games so no point looking too far ahead.

Neither us or Derby are going to win all of our remaining games, regardless of tonights result. The 'it's in our hands' stuff is pointless.

Aye, so surely Derby are the ones who have something to be crying about?

I still think there's something there with him, and I could be totally wrong about his attitude as far as it transmits to the players. And to be fair, this would be his first failure after three good seasons. I wouldn't have a huge amount of confidence in him. But I think he's shown enough to deserve the chance to prove beyond all doubt that he's not the man for the job.

This might be unfair, but I feel like at some stage Evatt loaded so much pressure onto himself - his Pep comparisons, Barrow/Bolton-lona, managing in the Premier League in five years - that us struggling is more about him saving face than motivating the team. It's like late period Mourinho, everything is against us, everything is someone else's fault, the players are scared, the fans are cunts. If everyone would just respect his genius and get out of the way we'd be fine. I'm still broadly behind him, to the point I'd give him another crack at it even if he fails this year. But all managers have a shelf life, and a character like Evatt, when the wheels come off things will really turn sour. I feel like this is his chance with us.

Two seasons in a row we've spent very good money for this level on strikers who have immediately underperformed. If we don't go up, that failure in recruitment will be the single biggest reason. Over £1m on Vic, Collins and Dan. Collins, Bod and Jerome have four goals for us this season. A past-it Dwight Gayle has three in less than a 10th of the number of appearances. But, having said that, someone had it right yesterday. I wouldn't have swapped our XI yesterday for Stevenage's, nor Exeter's or Blackpool's or Wigan's. We had the better players in these matches and didn't win any of them.

And yet they did deal with him, as every team does. 33 appearances and 0 goals for a centre forward playing for a promotion chasing team is properly hopeless. Jerome, Collins and Bod have four goals between them in 67 appearances for us this season. They are all collectively a huge problem. Jerome's only saving grace is that he didn't cost us 750k.

12th in the league since January. 5 wins in 14 games. It's not over til it's over, but that's pretty damning. Nowhere near as good as we think we are.

We've won 13 from 19 so far at home, averaging over two goals a game. There will only have been a small handful of seasons in the past 30 years where we've, on paper, given home fans more to shout about. I don't think Evatt or the team could've done much more. Home fans are generally pretty reserved in most places. Also to be fair a number of the sides who've turned up at the Reebok have been woeful and uncompetitive. It'd still be soft as shite to be worrying about a few extra hundred Pompey fans though.

People aren't going to move from under the scoreboard in the ESL, where they've been able to stand anyway for decades (and balloon nearish some away fans). Nor will there ever be the will to make sure people there sit. So having this in the North Stand sounds like a mess waiting to happen. It'll just piss off a load of people who'll have to move, or they won't move and instead just complain about sporadic standers who've turned up near them. It's something that should happen, but there needs to be some realism that we've had safe standing at the Reebok for a long time now. This is just making it official.

Then win? Or sell those tickets ourselves? Or create more noise in our own ends? If we can't do any of that, then that's on us. But a football club choosing empty seats over fans for tactical reasons is about as soft as it gets. It's a sport meant to be enjoyed by fans at the end of the day. Incidentally, we could've sold half the stadium at Blackpool and Wigan and it wouldn't have stopped us getting beat.

Can't understand why anyone would prefer empty seats to fans in any circumstances. Feels like it defeats the point of why we all love the sport. If we can't shift them a week before, then they should go to whoever wants them. We'd benefit more than most if all clubs took the same view.

According to the BBC, they had 10 shots to our 6. 3 on target each. 6 corners each. Us ahead 54-46 in the possession stakes. They had one goal to our none. They needed a striker to get them over the line and signed an aging cast-off on a free. He's scored three goals in six matches (before getting injured yesterday... other team's also suffer injuries). We spent £750k on the L1 POTY who's got two in twelve. Let's not become Moral Victory FC. We have plenty of advantages of our own to make the most of.

Ultimately those stats don't prove anything, although they're almost unbelievably terrible. But for every Ipswich who go up and find their style of play translates perfectly to a higher level, there's a team like Burnley who try to play the same way against the better players and get found out. So far in this division, we've seen our style of play work brilliantly against the talentless cloggers, but not against the talented ones. Hopefully we get the chance to find out anyway.

In our first season in L1 we finished 9th. If last year we'd finished 8th and this year 7th, I wouldn't have considered that progress just because we improved our finishing position. If Newcastle or Chelsea spend £500m in the summer, finishing a couple of places higher than they do this year isn't progress. Last year we won a trophy but fell short in the playoffs. Were we to win nothing and fall short in the playoffs this year, that isn't good enough progress given we're another year into Evatt building the team he wants, the league is weaker and we've spent circa £1m on players. Even Evatt's own expectations have him managing in the Premier League in three years time, so not getting us out of this league with this squad, this season, is failure. Caveat: I like Evatt overall and we're still more than capable of getting promoted this season, so all is certainly not lost.

I struggle with this line of thinking. We've won one out of six against the four other best teams in the division this year. Last year we won one out of eight against the top four. The year before it was zero out of eight. Three seasons. 22 games against the best sides. Two wins, both of which saw the opposition receive a red card in the first half. I appreciate that teams in the Championship might play a different style to the top teams in L1, but equally we're not going to find Cambridge or Cheltenham up there either. Championship sides will be just as physical as Derby/Barnsley etc. but far better technically too.

I thought we were pretty good today overall. But there's only so many weeks we can come away talking about how fantastic our football is and how the opposition should feel fortunate to have been on the same pitch. 12th in League One over the past 14 games is shite and simply nowhere near good enough to get automatic promotion.

He's a cunt but he's our cunt.

To be fair though, we signed Collins in January for 750k as the reigning L1 POTY. How many other clubs in this division can call upon being able to do that? We also knew who Bod and Jerome were when keeping them on for this year. Even with the injuries, I don't think we can make the case that we haven't had the resources to see us through. Shouldn't be too big an expectation that those three will deliver.

At the start of February we were two points behind Derby with three games in hand. Since then we've played 10 games, only two against teams in the top seven (Barnsley, twice). We've dropped points against Wigan, Blackpool, Northampton, Exeter and Charlton. We're now one point behind Derby, but play five of our last nine against top seven teams. We only beat two of those five teams first time around. It's not hopeless, it's definitely not impossible. But looking across Evatt's reign our best chance at promotion is beating the lesser teams. We've fucked that and now this group is going to have to do something we haven't seen them do before.

Neither performances or results have been there for quite a while now. Obviously if we turn it on now we'll be reet, but there's little evidence that it's about to happen. And increasing evidence that we're just not that good.