Saddlers Social: Walsall's fantastic turnaround

Nick Etheridge

Credit where it's due, Jon Whitney has started to turn things around. Although it's still early days in his managerial career, there are signs he's improving.

The key element for me is the players have now all brought into his philosophy. Everyone at the club is pulling in the right direction.

Having had such a great season last year, and the mass exodus that followed, it was always going to be a tough ask for whoever took over.

However, JW has proven he can pick a talented player (Erhun Oztumer, Jason McCarthy) and develop them further. The key now is stability.

Dean Smith was able to develop a squad with minimum disruption for a number of years.

With the squad now starting to understand each other, tying these current players down is critical, as well as finding permanent replacements for Eoghan O'Connell and McCarthy, who are destined for bigger and better things, with a large chunk of that owed to Whitney.

Kevin Paddock

So, with 13 games remaining, we find ourselves miraculously sat just six points shy of the play-offs.

Regardless of the doubters (myself included) given what happened in the summer, Mr Whitney has done a ruddy good job!

So what do we need? Well if we use Barnsley as a guide, they were one point worse off at this stage last season and went on to make the play-offs, winning seven, drawing four and losing two of their remaining 13 games.

That would mean we would need home victories against Chesterfield, Oldham, Port Vale, Oxford, Swindon and MK Dons – then grab a win at Wimbledon plus our four draws coming from Southend, Shrewsbury, Coventry and at home to Fleetwood, leaving us to lose against Bradford and Charlton.

Yes, it's a very tall ask but, as we have seen, anything is possible in football.

Dan Gilbert

An excellent victory over Peterborough completed a difficult run in which we picked up an impressive four points.

And now the ever-improving Saddlers look like a side capable of sneaking into the play-offs!

Saturday wasn't our best performance but I still think we did enough to deserve the win. As for that goal, was it Erhun Oztumer's, was it Ama Bakayoko's or was it their goalkeeper's?

I've seen it from three angles and with two of them it looks like Bakayoko puts it in, the other looks like a howler from the keeper!

Either way, it was a fantastic end to the game and has given us all that little bit of hope. We couldn't, could we?

Richard Kendrick

Six more points, just two more wins, and we should be safe in League One. That's a glass half-empty statement if ever I've heard one, among all the positive talk of the play-offs.

But I think we should all give it a couple more matches and allow the teams above to play their games in hand before we start talking about that.

I'm actually happy that we're only six points away from hitting 52 points and realistically being safe. It's a relief as I honestly thought we were going to be in a relegation battle a few months ago.

Credit to everyone in what is turning out to be quite an entertaining season after all.