Leyton Orient exploded out of the blocks at the start of the season and were, at one stage, one of the few teams in the country who hadn’t lost a league game.
They still have only one defeat against their name and manager Paul Simpson is under no illusions that they’re heading to provide us with a stiff test.
“I’m quite sure they’ll be that wounded animal who will want to get back to where they were four games ago,” he said. “After nine league wins and a draw at the start they’ve suddenly hit a bit of a brick wall.
“I don’t know why that is, but all we can do is be about us and what we do. We know they’ll come and try to play football, that’s how Richie Wellens does things. I played at Blackpool with him and I’ve followed his managerial career, he’s a footballing man.
“They’ll be well drilled and he has a group with some good individual players in there. They have a keeper with a wand of a left foot who can distribute, they have a midfield that can dominate games and they can score goals.
“I want it to be about us. We have to make sure Richie’s going away talking about us having good individual players come Saturday night as well. I’m looking forward to seeing him, I’ve talked to him quite a bit over the years, but I do hope he’s driving home to Manchester feeling angry and disappointed.”
And, of course, United have their own home and league records to look after.
“You have to want to maintain that for as long as you possibly can,” he commented. “We’ve got to get back to it now. We can change the focus from saying that we’re unbeaten in all competitions and we need to make sure we get on with being unbeaten in the league games.
“We know the FA Cup is coming, that’s for a few weeks’ time, this is now about making sure our level of performance is right in these coming games, and then we can see where we are.
“We’ll have a good indication at the end of this run of fixtures because we’ll be 16 games in and we’ll be starting to tick them off at that point.
“I think this is a really tricky time of the season, because you have the early buzz that goes with the excitement of a new season, but you then get to a point where it’s Monday to Friday and within that there are Saturday and Tuesday games to play.
“It all comes at you thick and fast. You have Christmas where there’s the excitement of everything that goes on, so it’s these months where it can get tough.
“This is where you have to roll your sleeves up, dig deep and be able to sustain a run and a level of performance that keeps you up there.”
“I actually spoke to the lads about the league table this morning,” he added. “I told them to look at it and enjoy where they are.
“Again, they need to remember what they’ve done to get here, keep it going, get the standards back, be professional about absolutely everything and demand it of each other every single day.
“My final point to them was that the new run starts now. Let’s get it back to preferably winning ways, but definitely not losing ways, and let’s see where we can be.”
And his final word was for the fans.
“I thought the numbers we got for the last home game was absolutely magnificent,” he told us. “To get over 5,000 of our own supporters in, they had good support as well, and I would imagine Orient will bring a few as well because of where they are.
“I know it’s a hell of a trip for them. If we can be maintaining 5,000+ of our own fans it means we’re doing things right.
“It’s the fans that are going to help to get us even better. They’re the ones who will help us to build this club.
“We’re not going to be able to do it off our own back, we need them with us, and if we can get them coming again we’ve got to make sure we have a performance that brings them back for the next one.”