Well, what a lovely long weekend that was. Still not getting carried away? If you made the trek to Colchester on Good Friday, well done, I’m glad you got the result your journey deserved. If, possibly, not quite the performance. I am once again asking: what the fuck was that mascot? Why, when I google ‘Colchester mascot’, am I being shown pictures of heavy machinery? Chaddy could deffo take him. Chaddy probably wouldn't know what to do with this. I certainly don't. Frank woul

Ah well, we had to lose some time, it’s not the end of the world. It was a kick in the minge, though, wasn’t it? We had good reason to be optimistic that we’d continue our winning run at Crewe. The starting line-up was unchanged, and Kavanagh was back on the bench. Woods has a shot deflected over early on; Daniels nearly got on the end of the resulting corner at the near post. Fondop nearly nicked in after a mix up between Connolly and the keeper, Lawlor. Sutton played a good

No. No. I’m still not looking at hotels. You are. You don’t need to book a hotel in London if we go up automatically. I’m trying to not get carried away. Honestly, I’m trying. But they’re making it very hard. Firstly, all our love to fellow blogger Andrea Heslop, who recently lost her dad. She wrote beautifully last weekend about how being at Boundary Park helped lift her after the hardest week of her life. The whole Latics family is with you, Andrea. Last Saturday had the p

EIEIEIO….. no. NO. Stop it. Don’t say it. Don’t google the date. Don’t look at hotels. Micky Mellon has told you to not get carried away. Hard not to, though, isn’t it? It was a glorious sunny day last Saturday, apart from the three minutes immediately after we left the house when it chucked it down with rain and hailstones and we got fucking soaked. Thankfully it had dried up by the time we got to the pub, which is just as well as it was heaving with Grimsby fans, and we had

Ba-da-da-da-da-da-da – TEQUILA! We’ve had some great days out at Prenton Park over the years. The FA Cup victory last season. Dale Stephens scoring twice in Paul Dickov’s first game in charge. Craig Davies’ stoppage time winner in 2007. We’ve had some awful visits there, too. The post-relegation ‘party’. The 4-0 hammering in 2005, when Ronnie Moore said we made them “look like Real Madrid” and “defended like a pub team”. Last Saturday was very much in the former category. Whe

Unbeaten in five games, four clean sheets in a row. Mellonball’s not so bad after all. One improvement on last season is that we generally comfortably beat the struggling teams. Remember losing at home to Maidenhead? Drawing with Fylde and Dagenham & Redbridge? Those days are behind us. So we were quite right to expect a win at home to Crawley, who were on a bad run of form that left them just above the relegation places. The cryptobro experiment hasn’t worked out well for th

Gillingham away is an absolute slog to get to. It very much wasn’t one of the fixtures I looked out for when they were released. If you made the journey to Priestfield last Saturday, you very much earned and deserved the performance you were treated to. You don’t change a winning team, but I don’t think there’ll have been too many complaints about Woods coming in for Payne. We’ve been wanting the team to be more attacking and start games on the front foot, and while it would

Well that was better than getting battered 3-0, wasn’t it? Yes. Four points from two games is definitely better than getting battered 3-0 twice. There was only one change to the starting line-up for the Fleetwood game, with Garner coming in for Fondop (which I was pleased about, because I could see Garner working well with Kavanagh, like he did with Mellon jnr). Which meant we were sticking with 3-5-2/5-3-2, which didn’t work at Swindon, and I’m not sure why we thought it wou

Ugh. We really are shite at lunchtime kick-offs, aren’t we? We had, to be fair, been shite in the match that kicked off at 3pm the previous week, and Mellon made four changes to the starting line-up. New boy Calum Kavanagh went straight into the first XI in place of the injured Garner, and Fondop. Simeu and Taylor came in for Drummond, Taylor and Stevens, with the formation switching to – in theory – 3-5-2. Well, it was worth a go, wasn’t it. Alas, we were under pressure pret

ARRRRRRRGH WHAT IN THE NAME OF FUCK WAS THAT? It’s hard to remember, or to believe it, now, but I swear, we were honestly the better team in the first half v Cambridge Utd. We’re the only team to have won at their ground in the League this season, and we looked like we were going to have a good go at doing the double over them. Both teams had chances without really looking like scoring, but I thought we had the better of it. Payne had a shot go wide after good work down the r

Ugh. Lunchtime kick offs are shit. I guess they’re even shitter if you got up in the middle of the night in order to be in north London for midday. Thoughts and prayers with you poor bastards. And it all started so well at the Hive, didn’t it? We started on the front foot, as we’ve been wanting the players to do all season, and had a decent chance in the first minute, when Pett played a good ball into the box and Garner went down, but the referee was having none of it. Bizarr

January 24th today, and we’re still unbeaten in 2026. January 2026 kicks January 2025’s arse! Come on, let’s take our wins where we can. Before last Saturday’s game, the club paid tribute to former colleague, Dale Harris, who tragically passed away on January 12th. Dale served the club as a matchday volunteer, a coach and education officer with the Community Trust, and as Head of Commercial during our promotion season, before moving on to become the commercial manager at Chad

After a hectic festive period, welcome to the bleak midwinter. “Thought we had a million-pound pitch? We shouldn’t be having matches postponed for a bit of frost! Fucking tinpot!”. It’s been -8C overnight this week, it’s barely been above freezing, and people were being told not to travel because of Storm Goretti on Thursday. Sometimes you have to do the sensible thing rather than the mad bastard just-soldier-on-my-mum-didn’t-fight-at-D-Day-for-this thing. We can’t say we did

Happy new year, everyone! 2026 has a hell of an act to follow. And we finished 2025 in some style. I could barely be arsed to watch the highlights of the Grimsby match. If you trekked to Cleethorpes on Boxing Day, you deserve a medal. Hammond was back in for the injured Stevens, and Simeu was in for Daniels. Not sure what Sutton has to do to get another shot at the starting line-up, he was superb in September. As Ryan Williams said on Twitter, we started the game like the pl

Happy Christmas, everyone! It certainly has been so far. Firstly, I’m gonna say it again: people from Tranmere are not scousers. Birkenhead and Liverpool are very different places, and God put the river there for a reason. Secondly, that ‘feed the scousers’ chant is cringe as fuck. Feel free to say “it’s not that deep/it’s just banter, love” or some other convincing well-considered counter argument. Poverty chanting is shite. You can donate to Oldham Foodbank here . It was a

Welcome to my Christmas blog. I’d like to thank you for the year. And what a year it’s been. It didn’t start too well. It had all looked so promising before last Christmas. Stones and Norwood looked like they’d been playing up front together forever, we’d had three fantastic performances in the FA Cup and I was so convinced that we’d win the league that I stuck £50 on it (well, £25 each way, but still). And then the York game on Boxing Day – which we were all fully confident

Thanks to Will for writing last week’s blog. Hope you and the rest of OASIS had a great time at Crawley, Will, and I feel obliged to point out that I’m simply taking back the blog reins this week and you absolutely didn’t disgrace yourself at a curry house in Crawley and get so incapacitated that you were incapable of reporting back for us. As Will correctly pointed out, I did not miss the Walsall game because I was watching Real Madrid v Man City, I missed it because I was a

Arlene refuses to go to Milton Keynes, as do I henceforth after last Saturday’s absolute horror show. It’s not the football or the fact that we lost…again. It’s not the town, which is one of the more interesting socio-geographical experiments of the postwar period. The problem is the utter soullessness of a massive football ground – a cathedral! – with no one in it. Gimme Braintree or Aldershot or any of the other National League grounds with trees in them. Anywhere but Stadi

In her brilliant memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson isn’t terribly complimentary about her hometown: “Accrington is not famous for much. It has the world’s worst football team – Accrington Stanley – and a large collection of Tiffany glass donated by Joseph Briggs.” By 2.30pm last Saturday, we had made Accrington Stanley look far from the world’s worst football team, and I wished I’d gone to look at the Tiffany glass instead. As an away day, it

“Hoping for a goalfest after last Saturday.” Ask, and it will given you; seek, and ye shall find. (Matthew 7:7) Yes, three goals count as a goalfest. Don’t be greedy. Finally managed to get my OASF Road to the EFL sticker album last Saturday. Don’t worry if you missed out, they're now available online . To my utter delight, I got a Fondop shiny. The day was already made. There was one change to the starting line-up, with Woods coming back in for Payne. I like Payne, he’s ener