Off To Witton!

Here we go! The first of a series of four games that we have to win if we're to have even the slightest opportunity of avoiding the drop through on-pitch matters alone. And what better way to start this mini-run than by visiting a team that we've never beaten away from home in the Northern Premier League?

In the previous twelve meetings at Witton the 'Albion' have run out winners on no less than ten occasions, scoring twenty five goals to Mossley's eight in the process. In fact we've only beat them four times in 25 encounters during our time in the NPL.

You have to go back thirty five years to our final season in the Cheshire League for the last time we returned from a match with Witton with something greater than a point. We do have more recent experience though of returning from Witton with a win. During the 98/99 season Nantwich Town played their home games at Wincham Park and Mossley emerged from the fixture between the two sides with a comfortable 4-1 win.

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Witton's Wincham Park ground once went under the name of the Bargain Booze Stadium; a sponsorship deal that was the subject ridicule in the best selling U.S. sports magazine 'Sports Illustrated' by being described as a 'Sign of the Apocalypse'. These days they play at the slightly less amusing Brittania Carpets Stadium.

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Mossley's cause isn't going to be helped by coming up against a side that's in with a real chance of claiming the Championship title too. Albion currently lie in second place, two points behind Burscough but with two games in hand as well. They've also claimed sixteen out of a possible eighteen points in their last six home games but those two dropped points came in their last game with Grantham, a side that has already been relegated.

Prediction: Staring relegation in the face. Up against a form team. Supporters that have almost been brow beaten into submission. A squad that has just been slated in the paper by a manager desperately trying to whitewash an entire season so that it doesn't discourage potential employers. What better time then to lay one hoodoo to rest and kick start the hopes of a late surge to safety? A Mossley win.