Preview: Latics v Harrogate Town

It’s just over a month since Latics fans were staring down the barrel of a comme-ci-comme-ça season.

Consolidation (whatever that means). Mid-table nowhereness. Win, draw, defeat, repeat.

Now Latics are very much in the hunt for the final play-off spot, having vanquished two seventh-placed sides in succession. They are enjoying their best stretch of league results since 2005-06, when they won six games in seven at a similar time of the year. (After that run, Ronnie Moore’s side didn’t win any of their remaining seven games and ended up in 10th place. Ho hum.)

Footballers, managers and fans know that this time of the season is when the truth of a team’s capability is revealed. The league stops lying. You are where you deserve to be. You deserve to be where you are.

The stakes for the next game are higher than they were for the one before. The increase in jeopardy is exponential, plotted on a steepening curve.

Micky Mellon is enjoying his finest period as Oldham manager, and arguably his finest period in football management. He led his team to the brink of nothing, pulled them away and sent them on the righteous path of graft, improvement and success. Latics have accumulated – are accumulating – terrific performances and, unlike at the beginning of the season, they are accumulating the points that those performances merit.

The players don’t look hungry. They look greedy. They want more of the ball, they want more tackles and headers, more crosses, more pressure on their opponents, more goals, more points. They want more clean sheets. The want more of all football’s virtuous behaviours, and when they get them they want more still. More more more more more.

They took Chesterfield to the cleaners on Tuesday, scoring three superb goals from open play, running their opponents into the ground, making them look like relegation candidates rather than play-off chasers.

There was a certain swagger about the players’ celebrations on the pitch at the final whistle on Tuesday, but you don’t get the feeling that they’ll have been slouching in training ahead of today’s fixture against lowly Harrogate Town. You can imagine them waking up on Wednesday morning, having a little smile, then getting out of bed ready to suffer some more for the cause. Yes, the night before was special…but not that special. Not Wembley special.

For once, I am lost for words (not great for someone in the words trade) about the individual contributions. A match report could do Oldham justice only if it were about 200,000 words long, detailing every single action of the game. You could watch it from

whistle to whistle a thousand times and each time find something new to be pleased about. Even then, there’d be no space to talk about the players who didn’t get on the pitch or in the squad. Kane Drummond ran away from the Oldham fans when he scored his second and Latics’ third, and towards the Latics subs, who were all waiting for him in the corner, cockahoop. When Mellon tells the subs (and the stiffs) that they might be involved in the most important action of the season, they believe him. They get ready for it.

Take, for instance, Oli Hammond, who emerged from Tuesday’s game as a very capable strike partner to go with his credentials as an all-action midfielder.

Latics play Harrogate Town tomorrow, who are fighting for their Football League survival. They have a decent chance of securing it in their final eight games, but it’s tight. It looks like two from a maximum of six at the bottom to go down. In a couple of games’ time, it’ll be two from five, and so on…until it’s two from two. Latics beat Town 0-1 in the reverse fixture, signalling their willingness to work like Trojans to get a result in League Two, doing the ugly things. Latics can afford to lose one game and possibly two in the run-in and still finish seventh. Jeopardy does strange things to footballers at every level, but so far Latics are showing no sign of flinching, and every sign of taking the opportunity they’ve given themselves.

Latics fans can be proud of this team whatever happens in the final nine games. Micky Mellon has been teased in the past (including by me) about his assertion that he knows what good looks like. But he does, doesn’t he? And now we do too, don’t we? This outstanding run Latics are on is two and a half years in the making, and it’s all Mellon’s work.

Something is happening, but what?