Second place!

Well, somewhat predictably, after having beaten two top sides in close matches, Oldham succumbed to a "lesser" team, or a team they might have been fancied to beat. Of course, Millwall are resurgent under a very good manager, and so the result isn't all that outlandish, but nonetheless disappointing, as the Latics lost 2-1 at home to Millwall.

My model predicted 6042, and the gate was actually 6181, so at least I was only about 140 out in my prediction.

Movements forward have been made in my bivariate Poisson model, so hopefully by Tuesday evening (pancake Tuesday!), I'll be able to predict the result of the Port Vale v Oldham match. Quite an important one really, another defeat will leave us playing catch-up big time. A win is needed badly. Come on Oldham!

Attendance vs Crewe

It's been a couple of weeks since the last home match, and with a couple more wins under the belt, one might expect a bumper gate in the home match tonight against Crewe, which kicked off about seven minutes ago. Particularly given one of the two wins was a crushing 3-0 win at local rivals Huddersfield. However, my model of attendances predicts a gate as low as 4,289.

A number of factors cause this: it's a Tuesday night; it's December, Christmas is coming and all that. However, it's the first home game for a while.

I can't believe the gate will be that low. I'm looking into forecasting using what is apparently a very good forecasting device, the exponentially weighted moving average. By altering the parameter on the weight from 0.1 to 0.9 I get a range of forecasts between 5,122 and 5,903.

I'm inclined to go with the naive forecast with parameter 0.1 to be honest, I reckon the gate will be just around 5,000. I could be proved wrong, and my model right however. I just hope Latics win!