Latics diary: Mellon’s mea culpa, crowd counting, motivation, Gas

Micky Mellon has his critics just at the moment, and the uncertainty surrounding his tenure at Boundary Park is growing in significance every day. Will he, won’t he? Will they, won’t they?

But it is a rare day when Mellon sees things differently from the Oldham Athletic faithful. When the team was announced some time before 2pm on Saturday, everyone knew they were in for a tough watch when the game against Fleetwood Town started. Latics’ two players with pace were on the bench, the midfield was get-stuck-in and uncreative, the implied flat back five screamed undue caution. Mellon owned all those mistakes in typical fashion in his post-match interviews – he has a dour countenance, but his honesty makes him very, very likeable.

Latics started the match with almost nothing to play for in the season: it’s quite possible that they’ll be the first club to eliminate mathematically both possibilities for a League Two exit this season. But Fleetwood, having played a game more, were in the same boat. They turned up, Latics didn’t.

The first 45 minutes was awful from Latics. It was the worst they’d played this season –the most boring and least effective display by miles. You started off wondering what was at stake in the fixture and ended up contemplating the meaninglessness of existence by half time.

CROWD COUNTING

There are sophisticated techniques for counting the number of people in crowds without using fingers and toes. You take a photograph, choose a model such as density, Jacob’s or direct regression and a few seconds later ChatGPT will give you a number. This is how I know, for instance, that the official attendance for MK Dons v Oldham in the FA Cup 2nd Round earlier in the season was about three times the number of actual bums on actual seats.

Clubs generally count season ticket holders as attending whether they are there or not. Same with corporates, complementary tickets to schools and so on. That’s fair enough. Those seats are spoken for. I do not know whether or how flexi-tickets are counted – flexi-tickets are discounted, and you can use them for any five games you choose between when you bought them and the end of the season.

The official attendance at Boundary Park on Saturday was 6,669, with 284 coming from Fleetwood. The smart people who can crowd count in Boundary Park (with or without

technology) put Saturday’s number of bums on seats at a ceiling of 5,800 with a floor of 5,400. What does that suggest?

It suggests – no more than a strong hint – that season ticket holders are drifting away and are not being replaced by pay-on-the-day punters. Granted, Saturday was reasonably grim weather-wise, it’s rained every day this month (or is it this year?), and a number of people will have peeled off as a result. It’s the first weekend of February half-term, but I would have thought that puts as many on the attendance as it takes off.

Valentine’s day probably accounted for a few more people. I have a word of caution for them: if you’ve got a season ticket and Boundary Park doesn’t cut it as venue for a romantic day out, your relationship might be on borrowed time.

Whatever the cause of the growing difference between the official attendance and the number of bums on seats, the only way to get bums on seats for Latics for the remainder of the season is through the football on the pitch. Fans want entertainment, and they got the opposite in the first half on Saturday and not much better in the second.

Yes, good results are entertaining in and of themselves. But Boundary Park denizens have seen a fair number of attritional first halves this season. Sometimes Latics have triumphed in the second period, sometimes they have knocked on the door and come up short, and only once have they taken a shellacking (from Cambridge United).

There’s no need for the grim attrition now, for earning the right to play. Let the handbrakes off, have a go, see what happens. It’s a win-win, right?

MOTIVATION

The key is motivation. As of a couple of weeks ago, Drew Povey was still travelling with the team and was still being seen in and around Boundary Park during the week.

Mr Povey will be familiar to you from Channel 4’s Educating Greater Manchester – he was the headmaster of Harrop Fold Comprehensive. He was investigated by the Teaching Regulation Authority for maladministration and banned indefinitely from teaching by the Secretary of State for Education…before reinventing himself as a leadership and motivation counselling expert, surfacing at Boundary Park in an unknown and unspoken capacity.

It’s not my cup of tea, this guru stuff. For one thing, gurus are never really accountable are they? When motivation is lacking as clearly as it was in the first half on Saturday, it’s on the players and manager. The guru just has to say that he did everything right and slink off into the background.

GAS

Latics play Bristol Rovers tomorrow night at Boundary Park. On paper, this is a perfect game to write the many wrongs of Saturday afternoon. Rovers are only five points above the relegation zone, so they’ll come motivated. Looked at another way though, they are in peril, and ought to be unsound psychologically.

In the mid-table League One years, Latics had a decent enough track record of taking advantage of teams who had a lot to play for, including relegation-threatened ones. If I recall correctly, they put the final nail in the coffin of two or three of the four relegated sides one season.

It’s a midweek game, so the official attendance will be low and the number of bums on seats lower still. But good, attacking displays tonight and on Saturday away at Gillingham will make season ticket holders think twice about missing the game against Crawley Town at home on the last day of the month. A flat back five with dangerous attacking options on the bench will have them booking days out anywhere but Boundary Park.