Play Offs Quarter Finals

[MAD_MAGPIE]

It is a bit weird that a team can finish 30 points higher over the course of an entire season, but all that no longer counts, and instead a couple of one-off matched decide who gets promoted. Notts clearly deserve to be playing a division higher, not Boreham Wood or Bromley or whoever. We're clearly better than those teams because the table tells us so. Yet here we are.

On the flipside, I do understand that playoffs keep a sense of competition alive and make a season exciting right until the end. But in terms of pure sporting fairness and integrity, it doesn't hold up well.

I suppose everyone knows the rules to begin with, so we can't have much to complain about.

What it has done is open up the conversation about two automatic promotion places at this level when you have two teams finishing on +105 points.

It’s about time the national league was realigned with other leagues and we have three up and three down from L2.

If that were the case we would have secured automatic promotion as runners up which in sporting terms is fair. A runner up in any professional football league should get automatic promotion.

If it were three down from L2 Crawley and Wimbledon would be fighting it out on the last day. Herein lies the problem. Turkeys voting for Christmas. The question is are either of those two teams better than Barnet, Boreham Wood, Bromley or Chesterfield? Doubtful.

The evidence is there from those that come down and those that go up. Look in recent years Southend, Oldham, Sc.unthorpe. The exception being Grimsby who bounced straight back neither have set this league alight. For Sc.unthorpe they’ve not been able to halt their slide. In the other direction nobody has returned in the time we’ve been in this league apart from Hartlepool who have had three seasons in L2. They couldn’t carry on what Dave Challinor started.

Will anything change? Or when all has been sorted and the dust has settled will this season be confined to the history books as one of the most freakiest seasons in National League or even professional football history?