League leaders!

I might not be able to write that as a title too many times, so I'll make the most of it while I can! Admittedly the Latics have been performing consistently well for about 26 matches now (just 3 defeats, 16 wins and 7 draws in that time), but who knows what being top of the pile will do for nerves? For confidence levels? Will they get too high?

Remains to be seen. Today's a big test, as three of the biggest stars of the season so far are ruled out, and Oldham play a resurgent Millwall side. What will the outcome be? I'm currently working on a bivariate Poisson model to predict match outcome, and maybe by 3pm I might have got it working, in which case I'll post a prediction.

Lacking that however, I'll simply post my attendance model's prediction for today. In the past I've been surprised that it's been more correct that I've expected. Today is another time when this might be the case. The model says 6042, which seems to high to me. While we are league leaders, the opposition is Millwall, who can hardly be described as big rivals. They do have one draw in their current manager, Willie Donachie, who was at Oldham as assistant manager back in the glory days, about the last time the club was playing quite as well as it is now, and the last time the club won a promotion (16 years ago now!). I wait to see.

Come on Oldham!