Christmas is the time that sorts the men out from the boys.
The Christmas programme is the time that seperates what are going to be the contenders and the also rans, of course in the Championship its never that cut and dried with the closeness of the division from top to bottom, but after an awful run away from home, in truth a run that has been on the cards for a long long time we now find all those dropped points costing us dear and the real risk of dropping out of the top two if we fail to pick up maximum points over the Xmas period.
Some people get hacked off when the phrase "Must Win" is used but being blunt, if we dont on Boxing Day we might not be singing "We are top of the League" that evening.
So from that point of view we have to despatch Crystal Palace and then look for others to slip up if we want to try and restore our lead, but nobody should be in any doubt, we have lost a great chance over the past few weeks to put real space between us and third position, a chance to virtually bolt on automatic promotion, but we didnt take that chance and we now find ourselves embroiled in what at the moment is a four way fight for two places and if we are not careful and we dont improve drastically, dropping out of the automatic spots and scrambling to stay in the play offs,
Our big problem in the New Year is going to be picking up points on the road, three wins is not good enough out of 11 games, but the blunt truth is that our road trips in the first half look a lot easier than who we have to face in the second half, we have to play 7 of our rivals in the top half of the table away from home, and given that Birmingham in the bottom half will be no cake walk, this only serves to emphasise how we have lost the opportunity that we had.
So its a big big game against Palace, we have no scope for doing anything else at home but winning as we almost certainly cant rely on our away form, if we cant pick up points at the likes of Bristol City and Doncaster its worrying how we will get on at the likes of West Ham, Hull and Leeds