Walsall blogger Mark Jones talks about top six starts, players yet to return and bemoans the poor attendances ahead of Saturday’s trip to Crewe.

Right, first the good news. A 100% home record and the top six place that we kept warm for so long last season. All we have to do now is keep it going for another 44 games!

Just as I was thinking I’d be cutting and pasting the same paragraph about ‘plenty of effort but not enough goals in the team’ every week throughout the season, up popped man of the match Jabo with a deserved and welcome winner.

I did actually overhear someone coming out of the Banks’s Stadium on Saturday saying that an average of four points from two games ‘should be enough come the end of the season’.

You can’t really argue with the logic of that – personally I’ll be disappointed to say the least if 92 points isn’t ‘enough’ – but what separates us Walsall fans from the rest is our profound realism.

Nobody (well apart from the aforementioned bloke) is expecting runaway success this season. I still think top half will take some doing, but the Saddlers at the moment seem like a work in progress.

Reich and Hughes still need match fitness, the young players are still developing, the new faces still need time to gel. Add to that, Ricketts, Mattis, Weston and Roberts are still to return.

Getting that all-important second win as soon as possible is next on the agenda.

Now for the bad news! What concerned me most about Saturday and what should be concerning those running the club, was the 4,162 attendance.

If my estimate of Scunny following is correct, then we attracted less than four thousand for the first Saturday home game of the season.

Only Hereford got lower in League One and there were five higher in the bottom division.

It was 400 less than the lowest Saturday crowd of last season, lower than any of the August fixtures in League Two the season before – and that was immediately after relegation.

Last season we averaged over 5,000 home supporters per league game, so why are fans staying away?

Obviously times are hard at the moment and Walsall have always drawn from a relatively low-income catchment area to start with.

I suspect this will be the primary argument put forward by the club but the credit crunch is nationwide. I includes Burslem (6,643 at Port Fail), Nottingham (4,325 for County v Darlo) and plenty of other places with lower division clubs.

Clearly there are fans who have followed the Saddlers recently who are reluctant to attend the Banks’s at the moment. Last season’s post January 31st slump and the subsequent departure of Dicky Dosh may have had an even bigger impact than had previously been imagined.

I know people who have stopped attending regularly or who are picking and choosing their games. I’d wager there are plenty of others out there who do too.

I also know fans who, for a variety of reasons, haven’t renewed season tickets in the past couple of years and have never been contacted to ask why, despite the club presumably having all contact details on their database.

If the club doesn’t ask people why they’ve stopped attending, it makes it very difficult for them to do anything effective about it.

What happens on the pitch will make a difference to some extent. A good run for Jimmy’s boys will persuade some to return but I feel that others will need a bit more coaxing.

Huddersfield, Vale and Bradford, for the second season running, have drastically reduced ticket prices and seen a steep rise in crowds.

Now I’m not suggesting that we copy this (it’s just about the wrong time of year for that), or that our pricing is too steep (it isn’t). My point is that these clubs have made a gesture, a huge statement of intent and done so in a positive way.

In short, these clubs have recognised the importance of their supporters. I hope Saturday’s crowd will provoke the same kind of thinking in the corridors of power at our place too.