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After Boring Wood draw at Notts. I get the feeling Wrexham'll do it this season.

And in other news, Rochdale are out of the bottom two after beating Bradford City. Away. I always assumed they'd get out of it somehow, then again I assumed it about Stockport and Macc. To be fair though, 'Dale are rather better run, and I will be very happy if we can end up like them long term.

Right, we are top half for the start of the new year, a tremendous achievement by the players and staff (and supporters!), and I thought it would be interesting to see where people currently see us finishing - and maybe compare it with the early season poll. Personally I think that 8th to 11th, which would represent our best finish since Maunders pulled out, is now a realistic target, but that we may just fall short. Whilst we won't suffer again the large scale changes we saw in the close season, we will probably lose one or two players, and there are some strong teams in the league. A reminder - in the first poll on where we would finish, nobody predicted a top half finish. That number again - 0.

Looking at the forecast for Tuesday with a maximum predicted temperature of one degree Celsius (about 34 degrees), I would expect it to be well below freezing by ten p.m. and even cloud cover would seem unlikely to save us. Should I write this one off?

I was wondering if any footage exists of or directly related to (i.e. not FAT etc.) APL matches? In this age of wall to wall coverage, and when you can even see recovered film reel of the mighty Newton Heath in action, it would seem remarkable if there was a complete blank on one of the greatest league periods in Alty's league history from as recently as the 1980s.

This is a new record crowd for this level of football, and by a big margin, with Notts breaking their own record set last season. Surely it is now impossible to deny that with crowds like this, and average NL crowds over 3,000 and every club currently averaging over 1,000, that the National League is now effectively "League 3", and should have three or four promotion places. It seems ridiculous that Barrow could be voted out after finishing third from bottom and yet now a club finishing in the same position is safe (though perhaps Rochdale supporters would disagree!).

Not related to teams/tactics, anyone who wants this please skip over.

Whilst the trough toilets may be seen as outdated and smelly, they certainly got the job done, fast. And there is an issue on the pop side.

And I would suggest that the old pop side snack bar, whilst small, could nonetheless be turned to selling old programmes/DVDs at a pinch, and as mentioned elsewhere, why not use the redundant space behind the pop side/Chequers corner for a stewards shed. I know I know, but nothing ventured, nothing gained...

Was this the biggest league crowd Alty have played in front of today? And what is the biggest one apart from Wrexham? I suspect the Colchester game, at least in modern times. And it's hard to believe there would have been much more in the Cheshire league - though I understand there used to be some stupidly big crowds in cup competitions, even the Cheshire cup!

Just for the record, on the stroke of half time, I have been positionig myself by the memorial wall on the stroke of half time and making a dash for the CSH the moment the half time whistle blows. Mostly, I have just about managed to get served and finish my drink for the start of the second half. I did a similar thing with the fan zone at the Oldham match on an admittedly busy night and missed a minute or two of the first half, with a shorter queue than I had been standing in all those times in the CSH. Still, hopefully things will improve. That has to be the aim - to get as many people as possible served at ht without missing game time. And indeed ultimately to help overturn this fatuous alcohol ban in view of the pitch at all NL games and preferably some FL games.  After all we don't have this requirement in other sports, or for that matter in NLN games such as Darlington vs. York, to the best of my knowledge. Alcohol watching sport for all, and if some spectators are a problem, punish them not the decent majority!