Around One – Some good results for us

Derby's Manel - perfectly good goal disallowed

In stoppage time they thought they had won it, in fact in all fairness they had won it, but a Manel winner was very wrongly ruled out for offside. This is the second successive game where Derby have been done by awful decisions but right now there will be no complaints from us.

Derby played well though, particularly during the second half in a performance that made you wonder just how they were even close to the bottom of the table.

"We knew that if we showed a good work ethic today we would have half a chance but at this stage of the season that offside decision could prove costly," argued Burley after their hard-earned point still left his side in the bottom three.

"We've got five crucial games ahead of us but we've still got great belief that we can stay up."

As the afternoon’s results came in the only bad news was that of Watford’s win that keeps them above us on goal difference – but the win was against Crewe and that takes us within a point of the side that Dario G said recently was chasing a play off place.

Watford led in the first half and in a two minute spell just after the hour they lost that lead to a penalty before regaining it within a minute with a crazy own goal as one defender Stephen Foster hit a clearance straight at team mate David Wright and it bounced off him and into the net.

Rotherham were a goal up at half time too against Ipswich through Chris Sedgwick and were still level with two minutes to go. Then the Tractor Boys hit them with two more through Darren Bent and Shefki Kuqi to take all three points back to Suffolk with a 3-1 win.

Ivar Ingimarsson - sent off in Reading's defeat at Bradford

Gillingham are teetering on the brink after recording a fifth successive defeat. Naturally away from home they didn’t try to play any football and once again fell to a goal late in the game. There were just eleven minutes left when Lee Hughes hit the winner.

It is difficult to understand why but in the last two years they have four times been to the Turf without actually trying to win any one of the games.

Franchise are no longer in the relegation battle – the good news came last Tuesday when they lost it – but they scored three times against Preston.

But why didn’t Preston win? We have sought the words of an impartial observer, none other than the Weary Whinger himself.

He said, "That’s just an example of our fortune this year – a microcosm of the season. We didn’t play well enough to have a convincing victory but we deserved a victory."

But he didn’t let us down – "That last goal was a sympathy vote for the Franchise team [he called them Wimbledon], the decision the referee gave. There was a lot of good will towards them from the referee but we are trying to get a play-off place and I felt it was still within the bounds of possibility.

"If the referee wasn’t in a position to see the handball then the linesman surely was. I could see it from the dug out, it was a clear hand ball and robbed us of two points.

"It was the underdog syndrome, the referee gave a lot of dubious decisions in favour of the home side."

Mathias Svensson - scored again for Norwich in their Good Friday win against Wigan

They are all but guaranteed the minimum of a play off place but there is a battle royal going on below them for the other three places. Ipswich with that 3-1 win at Rotherham were the only winners and with Wigan and West Ham are in the key positions now.

Millwall, Sheffield United and Reading are right behind but the Blades appear to be fading fast. They defended so badly at Sunderland on Friday that Neil Warnock said his wife could have scored against them – I think he meant a goal.

But it is at the bottom that we need to concentrate on now and just to think if we had played the Franchise and won recently then we would now be in fifteenth place with fifty points – just a thought.

There’s another full Easter fixture list over the next two days and again at the weekend when we travel to Cardiff for a game that has finally been agreed can kick off at 3:00 p.m. All the games shown below are kicking off at that time unless otherwise shown.

Burnley v Watford
Crewe Alexandra v Coventry City
Crystal Palace v West Ham United
Derby County v BRBC
Gillingham v Walsall
Ipswich Town v Sunderland
Millwall v West Bromwich Albion
Preston North End v Nottingham Forest
Reading v Norwich (5:35 p.m.)
Sheffield United v Franchise
Stoke City v Rotherham United

Wigan Athletic v Cardiff City (8:00 p.m.)

BRBC v Franchise
Cardiff City v Burnley
Crystal Palace v Wigan Athletic
Derby County v Preston North End
Gillingham v Ipswich Town
Norwich City v Walsall
Nottingham Forest v Millwall
Reading v Crewe Alexandra
Rotherham United v Watford
Sheffield United v Stoke City
West Ham United v Coventry City

Sunderland v West Bromwich Albion (4:00 p.m.)