I say four there because I believe that Reading still have a chance provided they can win their game in hand. However with three of their four remaining matches against sides who definitely have something to play for, they need to raise their game an awful lot on current levels to get the twelve points they need to have any chance of finishing in the top two - yet sections of the media still don't seem to have cottoned on to the fact that we have three more points than them having played the same number of games!
As for yesterday's match, I see our central midfield has come in for it's usual criticism from some and it's only right to say that I have done my share of slagging them off over the past few months, however, a penny of sorts finally dropped for me yesterday which now has me wondering if the stick our central midfielders have taken is really fair.
In a way, I think our midfield has paid the penalty this season for being so good last year. By and large, sides lined up with a 4-4-2 formation last season and so took on our midfield four in an even contest - more often than not, they came second as we established a reputation for being one of the best passing teams in the Championship.
Our rivals were never going to just stand idly by and let this situation continue and so we began to see a few teams play 4-5-1 against and I doubt whether it escaped notice on the Championship grapevine that the two worst home performances we gave in my view (Charlton and Leicester) were against teams playing 4-5-1.
Therefore is it really too much of a surprise to see that virtually every team that has come to Ninian Park this season has played 4-5-1 against us? Because of this, our midfield quartet has found itself outnumbered more often than not and, under such circumstances, I think you have to look at their performances in a different way.
To illustrate what I mean, our two centre backs have tended to get a lot of praise this season for their performances, yet any team employing an extra man in midfield has to lose one from somewhere else and, invariably, this has been from their attack. Therefore, our much praised pair of centrebacks have almost always found themselves facing a single striker - now, I'm not knocking Johnson and co here, but you could say that they have had it relatively easy this year because of the success of last years midfield!
We may not be the smooth passing team that we were last year, but, more often than not we get the job against these teams who have the extra man in midfield - one of the ways we do this is by being a bit more direct.
Take yesterday for example when two of our goals came from long balls to our target man. Burnley's midfield five consisted of the highly rated youngsters Eagles and McCann, the excellent veteran Alexander, Wade Elliott who always impresses me and Robbie Blake who is someone I would have loved to have seen in a City shirt at some time. With five such good players in the middle of the park, is it really fair to expect our quartet to match and then get the better of them - especially when you consider that one of our four, Ross McCormack, plays almost as much as a striker as he does a midfielder?
For a ten minute spell in the first half, Burnley got right on top of us with their midfield looking very effective and they probably deserved to be in front at the break, but, in saying that, how much work did Stuart Taylor have to do? With Burnley's single striker being a young kid (albeit one who has weighed in with a fair few goals this season), there wasn't much of a cutting edge to the visitors in the first forty five minutes and there were signs that City were begining to work out the problems they had faced.
By conrast, I thought we dominated the second half and I had the feeling that a goal was coming from about the hour mark onwards. Once Jay Bothroyd started competing with the Burnley centre backs rather than let them walk all over him as he did before the break, we had that cutting edge that Burnley lacked and so the visitors spent the second half on the back foot which gave McPhail and Rae that bit more room to operate in.
However, when Blake equalised, it appeared that the superiority we had enjoyed would count for nothing, but, just as against the jacks, we responded to the disappointment of conceding late on by scoring within a minute - that's the sort of thing that promotion teams do and it seems to me that no one else in this league is doing it at the moment and yet still no one appears to have noticed us!