September was not just shit. September was M&S shit. September was Campbell's Condensed Cream of Shit soup, served with shit croutons and a buttered crusty turd, washed down with a nice cold glass of shit. Thank fuck it's over. Given how bone-chillingly awful the performance at Rochdale was, it was maybe understandable that there were four changes to the starting XI v Salford. Kavanagh returning was a welcome change; I'm not sure that starting Temple was in anyone's interests

Abandon ship. Proceed to muster station. Prepare the lifeboats. HMS Piss The League is on fucking fire. I’m not judging you if you were queueing at the Regal Moon at 8:50am last Saturday waiting for them to start serving booze. Not for me, though, Clive. I don’t know how you manage to keep it down at that hour in the morning. Having been inexplicably dropped from the starting line-up for the Tranmere game after getting 3 goals and 3 assists in the opening 4 games, Kavanagh wa

Hmph. Regret to inform that HMS Piss the League was not permitted to dock at 12 Quays Terminal. I’ve watched us play at Prenton Park approximately 846 times, and while we’ve had some great days out there (last season being right up there), we’ve played a LOT of games there that have been a kick in the guts/bollocks/minge. I hoped last Saturday would be the former; I feared we might be due the latter, especially after seeing the team news. Dropping Kavanagh, who’s been absolut

4 games, 7 points, 5th in the league. A solid start, with flashes of brilliance. HMS Piss the League remains on course. It was a game of two halves v Swindon last Saturday, overwhelmingly dominated by Oldham in both. The only change to the starting line-up was Nevitt coming in for Fondop. The referee let a lot go but was reasonably consistent with it. We were on the front foot from the kick-off, and Delaney was unlucky to not get his first goal for us when Drummond crossed in

Hmph. I still think we’re gonna win the league, but maybe it’s gonna be harder work than I first thought. Mellon named an unchanged starting XI last Saturday at Colchester, and quite right too, don’t change a winning team. We were under a bit of pressure early on. Scott-Morriss cleared the ball a yard out from goal after Thorn played it into the six-yard box. In a passage of play after we conceded a needless throw-in when Scott-Morriss missed Daniels’ pass, Hunt hit the post.

I’ve seen enough. We’re gonna win the league. If you made it to the pub last Saturday morning for pre-match pints, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. I did no such thing. We were meeting our mates for tea that evening and there was no way I was going to be awake for wine and tapas at 6pm if I started drinking at 11am. I’m too old now and too much of a lightweight, and I am OK with that. It’s just as well I didn’t fancy a drink in the ground, as queue

Meh. It was only a pre-season friendly. It must have been, right? It can’t have been a League Cup game. Not on a Saturday. No, it was a decent pre-season run out against a Championship team who’ve spent big. Onwards and upwards. It did make me laugh how many people went on and on before the game about what a dump Stoke is. Good job we’re all from the Vienna of the North, eh? Everywhere is a shithole and everywhere is brilliant. There are bits of Paris that are fucking horribl

HAPPY NEW SEASON! A time for unbridled, baseless optimism, and for bitching about what colour the cuffs should be on the new home kit. Hope you’ve all had a lovely summer. It probably would have been a lot more lovely if Tuchel hadn’t completely surrendered our midfield to Argentina in the semi-final, but hey ho. At least our ever-lovable South American friends finally got what was coming to them in the final. Felicitaciones, Espana. It was a very enjoyable World Cup, despite

Ahhhh. What a lovely end that was to what has been, overall, a lovely season. I was a bit surprised to see Hudson in the starting line-up against Accrington, after his horrible-looking injury at Newport. I didn’t think it was worth risking it if there was any danger of him still being concussed, but he was understandably desperate to try to get the clean sheet record, the medical team must have cleared him, and Mellon was happy to give him the chance. Disappointed that Fondop

Sigh. Last weekend certainly wasn’t dull, was it? Well done to everyone who went to Newport in hard hats (or branded yellow caps paid for by the club if you’re one of the Ringfence Blues on the booze bus). Much to my annoyance, Andy settled a week-long argument on the train down and proved that he suggested going to the last away day of the season as Bunkabin Man on Twitter two days before I did. I couldn’t fault the Welsh hospitality. I asked for a large rosé in the Pen and

Fuck’s sake. That was a bit shite, wasn’t it? I was in bed feeling under the weather and debating whether or not to go to the game at 2pm last Saturday. I did eventually drag myself to the Rocky, but I didn’t go the pub, and apparently I missed out on Salford’s fans singing ‘Oldham’s a shithole’ on the Clayton. Ewan MacColl famously wrote a song about Salford being the Paris of the fucking North, of course. The guest of honour was Hartley, the Dr Kershaw’s mascot, as there wa

Sigh. Sorry. This is all my fault. When writing last week’s blog, I had a horrible feeling that saying “the manager of the month curse isn’t real” would come back to bite me on the arse. Sadly, that proved to be the case. Shrewsbury itself is lovely. We went to the Market Hall before the game and had a couple of drinks and a very good cheeseboard at PetitGlou Wine Bar. We do away days in style. I hoped that the owl mural on the wall would prove to be a good omen. We also had

Well, what a lovely long weekend that was. Still not getting carried away? If you made the trek to Colchester on Good Friday, well done, I’m glad you got the result your journey deserved. If, possibly, not quite the performance. I am once again asking: what the fuck was that mascot? Why, when I google ‘Colchester mascot’, am I being shown pictures of heavy machinery? Chaddy could deffo take him. Chaddy probably wouldn't know what to do with this. I certainly don't. Frank woul

Ah well, we had to lose some time, it’s not the end of the world. It was a kick in the minge, though, wasn’t it? We had good reason to be optimistic that we’d continue our winning run at Crewe. The starting line-up was unchanged, and Kavanagh was back on the bench. Woods has a shot deflected over early on; Daniels nearly got on the end of the resulting corner at the near post. Fondop nearly nicked in after a mix up between Connolly and the keeper, Lawlor. Sutton played a good

No. No. I’m still not looking at hotels. You are. You don’t need to book a hotel in London if we go up automatically. I’m trying to not get carried away. Honestly, I’m trying. But they’re making it very hard. Firstly, all our love to fellow blogger Andrea Heslop, who recently lost her dad. She wrote beautifully last weekend about how being at Boundary Park helped lift her after the hardest week of her life. The whole Latics family is with you, Andrea. Last Saturday had the p

EIEIEIO….. no. NO. Stop it. Don’t say it. Don’t google the date. Don’t look at hotels. Micky Mellon has told you to not get carried away. Hard not to, though, isn’t it? It was a glorious sunny day last Saturday, apart from the three minutes immediately after we left the house when it chucked it down with rain and hailstones and we got fucking soaked. Thankfully it had dried up by the time we got to the pub, which is just as well as it was heaving with Grimsby fans, and we had

Ba-da-da-da-da-da-da – TEQUILA! We’ve had some great days out at Prenton Park over the years. The FA Cup victory last season. Dale Stephens scoring twice in Paul Dickov’s first game in charge. Craig Davies’ stoppage time winner in 2007. We’ve had some awful visits there, too. The post-relegation ‘party’. The 4-0 hammering in 2005, when Ronnie Moore said we made them “look like Real Madrid” and “defended like a pub team”. Last Saturday was very much in the former category. Whe

Unbeaten in five games, four clean sheets in a row. Mellonball’s not so bad after all. One improvement on last season is that we generally comfortably beat the struggling teams. Remember losing at home to Maidenhead? Drawing with Fylde and Dagenham & Redbridge? Those days are behind us. So we were quite right to expect a win at home to Crawley, who were on a bad run of form that left them just above the relegation places. The cryptobro experiment hasn’t worked out well for th

Gillingham away is an absolute slog to get to. It very much wasn’t one of the fixtures I looked out for when they were released. If you made the journey to Priestfield last Saturday, you very much earned and deserved the performance you were treated to. You don’t change a winning team, but I don’t think there’ll have been too many complaints about Woods coming in for Payne. We’ve been wanting the team to be more attacking and start games on the front foot, and while it would

Well that was better than getting battered 3-0, wasn’t it? Yes. Four points from two games is definitely better than getting battered 3-0 twice. There was only one change to the starting line-up for the Fleetwood game, with Garner coming in for Fondop (which I was pleased about, because I could see Garner working well with Kavanagh, like he did with Mellon jnr). Which meant we were sticking with 3-5-2/5-3-2, which didn’t work at Swindon, and I’m not sure why we thought it wou