With the world of football now once again enthralled in the banality of the European Championship qualifiers it seems a good juncture to look at the fights at both the top and bottom of the Championship.

Today I am going to focus on the bottom of the Championship and look at the teams fighting what seems to be a losing battle to avoid the trap door of relegation to League One.

Unlike the Premiership the relegation battle in the Championship looks fairly clear cut with Sheffield United (35 points) in the last relegation spot four points away from safety, with Scunthorpe(34 points) and Preston (31 points) further behind and needing a minor miracle to survive.

Sheffield United have been one of the traditional yo-yo club’s bouncing between the Premier League and the Championship for as long as I can remember.  It seems baffling that next season we could face the prospect of Sheffield being without a team in either of the top two divisions of English football.

So what do the teams in the relegation zone need to do to pull of the seemingly impossible and survive?

Immediately above the teams in the drop zone are Crystal Palace (39 points) and Coventry (42 points) with the latter in free fall having failed to win in the last seven games, but likely to survive as their performances earlier in the season will be just enough to keep them above the line.   

In order to catch Crystal Palace and/or Coventry it is likely that one of these sides would need to win at least four out of their eight remaining games or in Preston’s case five of their remaining nine games to survive.

This is not beyond any of these teams but with none of the bottom three winning more than 10 games so far this season it seems that the current bottom three will be playing their football in League One next season.

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