WE have got five games left to save our season, five games to keep ourselves in the English Football League.

These 450 minutes will be some of the most important in Latics’ history. The importance of staying in the EFL has already been spoken about for many months now, but we’ve finally reached the crunch point which we’ve all been expecting.

These five crucial matches get underway this afternoon with Northampton Town at home.

Northampton are our bogey team and they have been for a number of years now. There isn’t a single Latics fan who will have forgotten just how much it hurt when we travelled to Sixfields for relegation in 2018 and they have consistently performed strongly against us ever since.

After the Good Friday game, it’s Forest Green on Easter Monday. A top-of-the-table side will always be a difficult one to face but we’ve matched them regularly in the past — including the 5-5 draw at Boundary Park earlier in the season.

Saturday’s defeat to Port Vale was an infuriating one, but it showed that we are able to compete against those teams who are doing much better than us in the league. We really held our own and gave them a tough game which was largely dictated by refereeing.

Carl Piergianni’s cameo as a striker was the right idea late on in the game. It reminded me of how Peter Clarke used to perform under Shez, pushing up the field as the game drew close to finishing to use his physicality and ability in the air to cause problems for defences.

Now that we’re level with Barrow and Stevenage (albeit having played a game more), staying up is an easier prospect than before.

We are the form team of the three and just need to play reasonably well across these final five and get the right results to keep us in the division.