The wrap - Shrewsbury, Oldham and Fleetwood

We are not doomed... yet.

The Shrewsbury game had been largely dismissed as a defeat long before we kicked off. Oldham was supposedly the opportunity to scramble to safety, we'll never get anything from Wigan and Blackburn because they're too good, or Fleetwood and Southend, because they're bogey teams.

We're doomed.

There are lots of reasons that this is nonsense. I didn't get to the Fleetwood game, so I didn't get that visceral sense of despair resulting from their winner. However, objectively, we appeared to dominate, which suggests we're not quite as useless as some would imply.

Karl Robinson has suggested that we need a bit of luck. Which is sort of true, what we need is a bit of maths - keep doing the right things and eventually, by the law of averages, we'll get the right result. Against Fleetwood it seems we did a lot of the right things, keep going in that direction and the results we need will come. 

Second, we are still five points clear of the relegation zone. In one sense, very close, but it's still very much in our hands. In the 35 games played by the seven teams below us, just seven have been wins and eight have been draws - that's roughly 4 points per team over the last five games. There are about five games to play, so we're still looking at quite a few having to find a run of form, while we gain nothing, to drag us down. It's not comfortable, but all is not lost.

Third, and this is might sound perverse, we are one of only five teams in the division currently without a win in our last five games. Logic says that this will change eventually. Look back to our game against Bury, they had gone 8 games without a win, but beat us. Not because they are materially better than us (they are 14 points off safety, 19 behind us), but because, eventually, things run your way. We are, inevitably, getting closer to that point, or specifically, those three points. 

The point being that while nobody is too good to go down, we're good enough to stay up and there are plenty around us struggling for form. Talk of bogey teams and bad luck is baloney, if we focus on process, we should secure the necessary points to stay up. Or, at least, not enough teams will accumulate the necessary points to catch us.

And, staying up is all that it's about, one place above the relegation zone, one point away, it doesn't really matter at this stage. There are reasons we're not higher up, which we can pick apart to our hearts content during the summer. But until that point, the focus is on getting little more than one win in the next five. And that is wholly doable.