Personal pride at stake in run-in

Latics’ assistant manager writes every week for Chron Sport
A LOT has been said about how many points will be needed to avoid relegation from npower League One this season... and right now I reckon it won't take 50 to stay up.

I believe teams will survive by achieving fewer points than that. At the moment, we are on 47 and one or two more than we have currently will be enough to survive.

With seven or eight fixtures left, the current bottom-four teams would need to win four, five or even six of their games to reach the 50-point mark.

It will be difficult for sides at the lower end of the scale to get those wins together and climb out of trouble.

And the mathematics suggests strongly that this is unlikely to happen. I am not saying it can't happen, but right now we are looking firmly at finishing the season on a high.

I am concentrating completely on tomorrow's match at Notts County to try to get us a win — and I know that Paul is doing exactly the same thing.

Then we will kick on from there.

I know people say we are not playing for anything — that the play-offs have gone and with one more win we are safe.

For us, it is a personal pride issue. You should always try to win every game you play in.

We have had a really bad run in the latter half of the season and we owe it to ourselves to try and go back to the way we started the campaign.

As a coaching staff, we may be to blame ourselves along the way in various different ways.

The bulk of the team, though, is the same barring one or two players.

We need to give a little back now in the run-in.

There is nothing worse than coming into work every day after playing in a losing team.

That in itself has to be an incentive for the players not to let the season just peter out.

Looking towards plans for next season, the coaching staff have come together for one very important meeting already.

We met for three hours on Tuesday and we will probably have at least another two or three meetings between now and the end of the season to discuss moving forward into 2011-12.