OK, they’ve arrived far too late in the season to make the slightest difference but the four home wins on the spin we’ve strung together over the past month offer us a glimmer of hope that the awful Bescot form of the past couple of season’s might just be behind us, writes Walsall’s Sporting Star columnist Darren Fellows.

Indeed, had we managed to avoid the carnage of the final moments of the game at Huddersfield then I guess that Chris Hutchings wouldn’t have been far away from the League 1 April manager of the month award.

All of which is quite a turn around from our pre-April record of five defeats and a draw in the previous seven fixtures and with one further win pretty much guaranteeing a top half of the table finish the manager can be relatively satisfied with his team’s achievement over the past nine months.

Clearly there are more than one or two still unconvinced about Hutchings and some will be disappointed with another mid table finish but in leading a team on a shoestring budget so hampered by his employers inability to halt the horrific slide in home attendances he deserves a touch more credit than he’s currently getting.

And there lies the big problem. Saturday’s latest sub 3500 attendance marked a new low in our recent attendance record as our average attendance for the season eventually fell below the 4000 mark. Artificially boosted early on by the embarrassing sight of Leeds fans swamping the Banks’s Stadium our average attendance has edged itself back towards a more realistic level with the passing of every home fixture and the current regime can head towards their summer breaks knowing that just about all of the additional numbers gained by that miracle period under Ray Graydon have now been lost. Not quite back to square one sadly, more like a bit of a way back behind that particular square.

Clearly it’d help if the powers that be were as efficient in searching for new fans as they appear to be in ensuring that those who disagree with their perfect world are denied admission. Offering the olive branch of dialogue with supporters groups with one hand and then metaphorically thrashing a critic of their regime with it a few days later isn’t exactly the most effective way of bridge building.

Where Hutchings and his team go from here however is anyone’s guess. Roy Whalley’s recent comment in the wake of criticism of the manager that that “the size of the crowd affects the size of your budget and for him [Huchings] and Martin to take us through the season where we have not been involved in a relegation battle is a considerable achievement” is hardly reassuring for any future promotion campaign. Read it again and I suspect that in attempting to rightly praise his managerial team the cat labelled ‘club expectations’ has been let slip out of the bag.

Hutchings hasn’t yet managed to manufacture a silk purse from the material afforded to him but in delivering a season where we’ve consistently been closer to the play off spots than the relegation drop line in a division that is financially divided more than ever before I think he deserves a fair bit of credit.

And with what I expect will be a further reduced sow’s ear to work with next season and no signs of the masses returning whilst the current regime remain in control I suspect that “not being involved in a relegation battle” may well be a “considerable achievement” for some time to come.