| 2011/12 Season Preview |
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| Oldham Athletic |
| Written by Mark W |
| Thursday, 04 August 2011 19:00 |
So the season is finally upon us and it is time to look at how we are likely to fair this campaign.
You can normally use last season as a starting point when considering the chances this time round but our season was such a strange one that it is difficult to know where to start. It is easy to say that we are going into the season on the back of one of the worst four months in living memory but it would be wrong to ignore what we did in the first half of the 2010.11 season with the same nucleus of players.
Looking at the squad we head in to the season with, I think that it is probably fair to say that it is weaker than the one we had in May. If you restrict the assessment to the starting eleven though, it doesn’t look so bad. The team that started against MK Dons in the final game of the season was:
Brill Winchester White Lee Tarkowski M’Voto Lowe Furman Reid Feeney Taylor
Taking our 1st team now, you can take out Brill, White, Tarkowski, Lowe and Feeney and replace them with Cisak, Black, Diamond, Morais and Smith. To me, that is a stronger side.
Clearly, the season’s outcome is based upon a squad rather than a starting eleven but the nature of League One is that the strength of the squad will not be known until two or three loanees arrive in the first few weeks of the campaign. That’s not something I’m in favour of but it is the way of the world and will be the case for most teams in our division.
The bookies have got us to go down and they are rarely wrong, but I think we can upset the odds and claim a mid-table finish which would be a fantastic outcome.
Of the rest of the league, I don’t think any of my predictions are too brave. Huddersfield will be right up there and I would imagine that Sheff Utd and Preston won’t be too far behind. Charlton won’t be a million miles away and I can see MK Dons and Brentford forcing themselves into the play-off mix as well. At the bottom, I can actually see the bottom four right now on alphabetical order all filling the relegation spaces at the end of the season. Tranmere, Walsall and Yeovil all struggled last time round and don’t seem to have significantly strengthened while I can’t see Wycombe being too much of a force. I can see Bury struggling but surviving and I’ve got a sneaky feeling that Scunny might find life difficult.
For no other reason than to embarrass myself come the end of the season, here’s my prediction for how League One will finish:
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| Last Updated on Friday, 05 August 2011 11:19 |
