Peterborough United look to Christmas past as they seek to end losing run

Posh head into the Christmas period having slipped outside of the play-off places for the first time since early October and on a run of four straight league defeats.

Posh did not win in the league in November and are still to get off the mark in December albeit last Saturday’s match at home to Shrewsbury was postponed.

The run bears somewhat of a similarity to a difficult run Posh suffered in the year they were promoted two years ago when Darren Ferguson’s side suffered four defeats in five between November and December.

Posh were beaten 2-0 at Crewe, 2-1 at home to Blackpool as well as 2-1 and 2-0 away at Wimbledon and Portsmouth either side of a 1-0 win against Plymouth.

When Posh broke that run with a 4-1 win at home to Rochdale, thanks to a 17-minute hattrick from Jonson Clarke-Harris, they went on to lost just one of their next 15 league matches.

A run McCann is looking to replicate to push Posh back into contention.

He said: “I remember going through a similar spell at Hull and I know Peterborough went through a similar spell in the Covid year where they didn’t win three or four games and then you can just get a spark at the Christmas period to give you a little incentive going into the second half of the season. That’s what we intend to do.

“It’s a 46-game season, we’re struggling a wee bit in terms of our last few results. I was pleased with the performance at Ipswich and now we need to turn performances into wins and start climbing up the league.

We’d love to go and win all three but we’ll have to focus on one game at a time.

“We will just go there and focus on us. We need to get back to that. We need to focus on what we do because we firmly believe we have a really good group of players here. We need to start producing more.”

Posh expect to have a mostly fit squad to face Charlton at The Valley on Boxing Day with the bug a few of the squad struggled with in the past two weeks not expected to rule anyone out.

Young full-back Benji Mensah is the only slight doubt as he has been struggling with a dead leg.