Football – England – League One
Tuesday 22nd January 2013 – Kickoff: 1945hrs
It’s back to business for Notts County at Meadow Lane when they take on struggling Oldham Athletic on Tuesday night as the Magpies look to resurrect their season.
After a difficult sequence of nine home matches where they’ve hosted all of the top six teams along with Bournemouth, Crawley Town and Stevenage, this basically equates to nine of the top twelve teams in League One. During this difficult run, Notts County have understandably found results hard to come by but they did beat Swindon Town 1-0 and earned points off Bournemouth, Crawley Town and Sheffield United.
Consequently, Notts County’s home form has taken a bit of a battering and currently stands at 4-3-6 17/17 but they can now look forward to playing catch-up with the play-off pack as a berth in the top six is still not beyond them at this stage. Future fixtures at home consist of Oldham Athletic, Crewe, Bury and Carlisle United who are simply not in the calibre of the top six so Magpies could potentially string together a couple of wins in the next few matches.
Despite losing experienced striker Lee Hughes to Port Vale, Notts County still possess some dangerous attacking players such as Alan Judge (5 goals, 7 assists), Frank Zoko (4 goals), Yoann Arquin (5 goals, 5 assists) and Jamal Campbell-Ryce (6 goals, 2 assists) in their armoury.
Visitors Oldham Athletic have also been struggling quite badly with just one win from their last nine league matches which was a 2-0 win at fourth from bottom club Colchester United back in early December. Since then though, The Latics have lost six from their last seven with defeats coming against Swindon Town, Yeovil Town, Doncaster Rovers, Crewe, Brentford and Coventry City – the only respite coming from a 2-2 draw at 20th placed Scunthorpe United on New Years Day.
Oldham have won four matches away from home with an overall away record of 4-3-7 15/22 which were at Portsmouth, Crewe, Hartlepool United and Colchester United but when you consider three of those four currently occupy places in the relegation zone, you need to take this with a pinch of salt.
It’s a similar story for Oldham though as they’ve lost the services of forward Matt Derbyshire who has linked up with his former Birmingham City boss Alex McLeish at Nottingham Forest and to be honest, Derbyshire was too good to be knocking around at this level for too long. The Latics still have former Everton play-maker Jose Baxter (9 goals, 3 assists) and the provider being Lee Croft (7 assists) but I do wonder about Oldham’s attacking depth and of course confidence levels which must be running on fumes right now.
To wrap up, Notts County know they’ve had a difficult patch of games but the rest of their season starts now and they are more than capable of picking up points and closing the gap on the play-off pack in the next couple of weeks. Oldham have lost six of their last seven and shouldn’t worry County tonight. I’ll go for a 2-1 win for Notts County here.
Pick: Notts County straight win @ 1.93 Bet Victor looks good value all things considered
