Clem Morfuni, Gavin Gunning, and now Aaron Drinan have all stated that making the playoffs remains the goal for Swindon Town this season, but what would they need to do to realise this?

Drinan said following Town’s defeat to MK Dons that play-offs were “100 per cent” still possible and Gunning has previously talked about sides in League Two regularly going on seemingly unlikely winning runs that take them into the post-season.

But if this were to happen, then just how good would Swindon have to be to put their foot in the door and swing it open?

With 13 games to play, there are 39 points left to play for, the number that Town have managed to accrue during their first 33 games of the campaign, meaning that the absolute maximum points total that Swindon could finish with is 78, which would get you into the play-offs during any season.

The lowest tally that has got a team into the playoffs in the last ten years is 70, and to get to that total, Swindon would require ten wins and a draw in their final 13 matches, i.e. they can afford a maximum of two more defeats or drop points in just three games.

At their current rate of points accumulation, Harrogate Town in seventh place would finish the season with 69 points, so it is possible that the bar is fractionally lower but if we are expecting Swindon to heat up then of the 11 other teams in the chase, one or more of them are likely to do the same.

It might seem conceivable, although unlikely, that a team could go on such a run, but to put it into perspective, just to get to 70 points, the absolute bare minimum, Swindon would need to pick up 2.38 points per game for the rest of the season, in the 2005/06 season when Reading set the record for most points in a Football League campaign with 106 points, their points per game was 2.30.

Additionally, only six teams in the history of the fourth tier have ever won ten games or more in a row, so Town might want to get cracking quickly.

So far this season, Swindon have been getting 1.18 points per game, during the club’s lowest finish in 1983/84, they had 1.46 points per game, so even to reach that level would take an upturn in the closing weeks of the season.

Bristol Rovers will now always be used as the team that came from nowhere to get promoted during the 2021/22 season, at this same stage of the season they were in tenth and just four points off the play-offs and with nine more points than Swindon currently have.

In a vacuum, it is still a possibility for something to come of this campaign, but even in a scenario where Swindon flourish into one of the best sides the EFL has seen, it would require virtually no other teams picking up any form of their own.

With the table as it is now, unless Barrow’s dire form persists, the top six spots look all but set and then below it there is a free-for-all with just three points separating seventh and 16th, and the problem there is that Town are six points down the road from Walsall at the bottom of that pack.

The club might still be pushing the line that League Two is a tough league to predict and nothing can be ruled out, but that might be the only thing that Swindon still have to cling onto in terms of the possibility of the play-offs.