Tonight sees us go into a huge tussle with Portsmouth, the winner of which will be in a strong position to mount a promotion challenge.
Defeat, either way, won’t be the end of the world, but neither side will want that. Pompey will be hoping to reel us in a little, especially as they have never seen the best of us – in three meetings over the last season-and-a-half, they have been better every time. We haven’t stopped prolific striker John Marquis scoring goals, we haven’t stopped them scoring goals and we’ve only managed to bag once, that being a late consolation this season.
However, we know we are better than those games against Pompey and a win tonight would leave us at the halfway stage of the season with a seven-point cushion over them. How mad is that? Little Lincoln City, the darlings of the media four years ago for being plucky underdogs, seven points clear of Portsmouth, who won the FA Cup in 2008 and were runners up in 2010. It’ll be a challenge of course, but however the game finishes we will be above them come 10 pm.
You know how I love conjecture, speculation and prediction, so I decided to turn to Footstats and run their league predictor, to see where they think we might finish. I have done this on two occasions previously, in 2017/18 and again the following season. The first time I ran it was after 23 games in 2017/18, the prediction was we’d finish eighth with 71 points when we actually finished 7th with 75. Still, it was fairly close, right? The following season I ran the same simulation after just 13 games, with us top of the table. It said then we’d finish second with 83 points, when in fact we won the title with 85 points. Again, it is close though, one position worse than we actually finished and on both occasions, we tallied more than it suspected.
That brings us to this season. Will the Imps earn automatic promotion to the Championship at the end of this season, ending a 60-year wait? It was 1960/61, exactly 60 years ago, we were last in the second tier, are we due to finally ascend back to the level we spent a decade in a lifetime ago? Well, the computer can’t actually decide.
It works the points out without rounding them up, and the current simulation has us in third, level on points with Portsmouth in second. They are due to get 81.61 points, which I would assume would round up, whilst we would get 81.24, which would round down. Given our goal difference is inferior right now, you would imagine we might lose out should our point tally be the same as Pompey come May. However, don’t forget that on both occasions I have run this simulation, we have ended up one place higher than predicted. what a difference that could make this season!
If the simulation is correct, we’d be due to meet Sunderland in the play-off semi-finals, and then either Doncaster or Peterborough if we made the final. Ipswich would miss out again, which is their big fear, whilst at the bottom the improved Northampton we saw this weekend would still go down, as would Bozzie and Burton. Wigan and Swindon would join them, with Wimbledon staging yet another great escape.
The interesting thing about this simulation is, if you run it tomorrow morning and we have won the game tonight, it is likely we’d be clear in second, and destined for Championship football. Could it really be such a pivotal game? Only time will tell.