Buzzin Championship Football

With two games in the space of five days, Easter is often looked upon as the business end of the season. Regular readers know that I don’t agree with that at all. Due to time constraints, I’m going to split the Easter Weekend into two sections.

For what it’s worth, the rest of the season is going to look something like this: Cardiff are as good as up. Only the current top seven have a realistic chance of winning promotion, but I’d go as far as to say that only the clubs in second to fourth place have a chance of automatic promotion and the remaining games are probably only going to determine who has home advantage in the first leg of the playoffs. Whoever finishes fourth won’t get promoted.

The bottom of the table is still competitive, although Bristol City’s defeat at Wolves means that the Robins have a very steep hill rather than a mountain to climb if they want to preserve their status in the Championship.

Although there are five games today – two are televised but won’t make much of a difference to the table – the most meaningful are tomorrow. Cardiff visit Peterborough, Sheffield Wednesday entertain Barnsley and Brighton travel to Nottingham Forest for the game of the day in a match that could determine the final playoff place.

Before anyone gets carried away with the idea that Cardiff will only have to turn up at London Road to leave with three points, consider this: Peterborough have only lost once at home to Cardiff in eleven league games. The problem with looking at that statistic in isolation is that it fails to take into account that although Posh have only lost one of their last six home games, they’ve recorded only one victory over the same period and they’ve had to come from behind in four of those matches. To put it another way, a point helps Cardiff more than it does Peterborough.

Sheffield Wednesday and Barnsley could both be sucked back into the bottom three before the end of the season – and despite having a game in hand, Wednesday fans need to be worried. Three defeats in the last five games ended their mini revival and three home wins since Christmas is nothing to write home about. Barnsley have recovered form their FA Cup thrashing: victories over Brighton and Watford since then indicate that the Tykes are good enough to survive this season.

The big game on Saturday is at Nottingham’s City Ground. Quite simply, Forest have been superb since Billy Davies returned and if any side are going to be the team that normally emerges from the pack to snatch promotion it looks like them. Unbeaten since the start of February, there are goals throughout the team and the recruitment of both Henri Lansbury and Darius Henderson has worked extremely well.

Brighton have stuttered a bit recently – the win over Palace a fortnight ago was their first since the start of February – and that’s largely down to their poor away form. After winning at Cardiff, they only scored once in their next three roadtrips and although they’re still within touching distance of the playoffs, goal difference could play a part in determining their fate this season. Seagulls’ boss Gus Poyet turned down the Reading job last week, but you get the feeling that if he’s going to lead Albion back to the top tier, their chance this season may have already gone.

I’ll be back before kick off for Monday’s games – I’ll be focusing on Barnsley v Leicester, Bristol City v Sheffield Wednesday and the massive Tuesday night game between Hull and Watford as well as recapping the action over the next two days.