Walsall blog: Our run-in history

And so we approach the final run-in, writes Walsall blogger Mark Jones.

As I’ve said before all I’m really hoping for is six performances from players who actually care and want to be part of the team next season. Then we’ll see where that takes us.

It’s been a long time since Walsall have gone into the last six games as wannabies, in the last ten years we’ve either been right up there chasing promotion (usually successfully to be fair) or fighting relegation (with not quite so much success). 

So the time has come to take a completely random and largely pointless look at some of our run-ins from the last few years:

1995/96

The last time the Saddlers had been promoted to this level we produced the kind of finish we could do with now - 17 points from 8 games, unbeaten in the last six and we put out the bonfire that was Blackpool’s promotion party. 

We finished in a season’s high of tenth, a mere four points off the play-offs and hopes for the next season were high. 

Lightbourne and Wilson were a potent partnership, Ada Viveash was a natural leader at the back, Jimmy Walker was developing into a top-notch keeper, there was Marshy’s versatility and we had the division’s best player in influential local boy Martin O’Connor? What could possibly go wrong?

Well apart from the money men thinking we could cash in on O’Connor, offering him a crappy one year contract which then went against us at tribunal (thanks a lot Allardyce) and losing him to Peterborough of all people.

And of course the board totally underestimating how the fans would feel about this complete lack of vision, ambition or respect for the paying customers. Plus ca change.

Still at least the Bonser Suite got built.

1996/97

Incredibly, despite the gaping hole in our midfield, we had an outside chance of making the play-offs the following year.

However this was due largely to it being one of the weakest divisions I can ever recall, Bury (Bury!) were champions and Crewe went up having took the last play-off place on 72 points.

If we’d won our last two games, we would have finished sixth.

Sadly we didn’t, being well beaten by mid-table Gillingham and Preston in the final week of the season.

In truth we weren’t anywhere near good enough, Kevin Wilson was on his last legs (his last Walsall goal came before Xmas), John Hodge tended to vary from anonymous to world-beater and back again (often in the space of one game) and what exactly Paul Taylor thought Mark Blake was good for was anyone’s guess.

The run-in did at least dampen expectations for the following year’s league campaign and the arrival of a certain portly Tamworth-based Dane.

1993/94

This was the season when I think I gave up hope of Walsall ever getting out of the Division of Doom.

We’d reached the play-offs the year before but some substantial re-building had seen us trawl Welshpool (for Wayne Evans), Stourbridge via Halesowen (for Evran ‘Mark’s Dad’ Wright), Rushall (for Stu Watkiss) and some hole in Kent where Jason Lillis was residing.

There was a flirtation with the play-offs but realistically we were about three or four players short.

We lost big six pointers at Wycombe and on the Preston plastic while home defeats to Colchester and a Mansfield team who seemed to have an average age of 16Ω still linger in the memory.

There was a big and quite ugly protest at the end of the last game which lead to, although no-one will ever admit this, Martin O’Connor being snapped up pretty quickly afterwards. (The season ticket renewal reminder for 94/95 used his arrival as a selling point.) 

Thankfully Hereford had more money than sense and snapped up Dean Smith for the same price as it cost to re-build most of our squad and we were on our way to promotion the next year. 

2004/05

Like a distant memory from your childhood that you’re not quite sure whether you’ve imagined or not, for a few weeks in 2005 under Paul Merson we were quite good.

An outbreak of common sense around Deadline Day had seen the arrival of Andy Oakes, admittedly not the greatest keeper we’ve ever had but a step up from some of the dross that had stood between the sticks the previous Autumn.

Julian Joachim, the first striker with genuine pace since the Byfield give-away, our first glimpse of Gerrard and Pead and that left back from Wycombe.

Probably by accident Merse stumbled on a 4-5-1 formation that got the best out of Joachim, fellow loanee Surman, Wrack, Leitao and Fryatt and we finished the season with a maximum 15 points out of 15 and a flurry of 13 goals.

A useful by-product of this system also was that Simple Simon Osborne merely had to sit in front of the back four and do very little (no change there) and it didn’t really matter. (If only we’d have had someone like Mark Kinsella in the squad at the time.)           

As an indication of how the following season was to turn out it was further from the truth than a soap storyline.

But of course relegation led to the arrival of DD and everything turned out alright in the end.

So what can be concluded from these past Saddlers campaigns?

Well nothing really, except that how we follow one season very much depends on what the latest thinking in the boardroom is. And who knows what’s goes on in there?