It is often heard that we shouldn’t get carried away with our current progress, because “we haven’t beaten anyone in the top seven.” Is this a misleading statement? We could turn this statement on its head and also say, we haven’t been beaten by anyone apart from Salford in the top seven. The table positions are fluid. For example we drew with Bromley when they were in the top seven and we have drawn with Swindon, both games we could easily have won. For me the the progress we have made genuine and without getting carried away, am looking forward to the rest of the season and a good January transfer window. COYP!

Doncaster got promoted as champions last season with 24 wins & 12 draws. It's always an advantage to beat teams in the top seven, however if you just draw some of those games it can be as good as a win.

Notts got 20 wins & 12 draws last season and missed out on the automatics by just two wins because if Notts had achieved those two wins they would have had a superior goal difference over Bradford.

If Notts achieve 25 wins, all being equal, they will probably be promoted even if they don't beat any of the current top seven, but it is always a big advantage to beat your nearest rivals as we witnessed last season.

I think that Notts under Martin Paterson are in a better place to win these top games now. I think there is a difference in the player mentality this season by having the belief that they can win these top games against their closest rivals.

The December fixtures will tell us a lot about whether that question of beating teams in the top seven will be answered or not when Notts meet four of the current top seven & one of them home & away.

I agree @Robbie December is going to be an interesting barometer as to where we are. On the question of beating those in the top seven I think we are more than capable of beating any of them. It’s just at the moment we only have Salford to base a judgment on and we weren’t good that day. In fact we’re a completely different team now. So reasons to be optimistic!

I think it's important, to be able to bag those statement wins.

It's a fair measure of where you stand in the division's pecking order. Of course you can still get complacent teams that can slip up against the lower orders and miss out on promotion because of that. But regularly losing to your close rivals says a lot. I guess we'll know through the December fixtures. SM's team was awful in crunch matches and at clutch time. We can see that MP is instilling more steel, and insisting on gutsy performances rather than just tactical instructions - let's hope it's enough to give MK, Walsall, C'Field and the like a really hard time.

I think the inability to pick up points against the teams above us cost us dearly last season. I don't see a repeat of that this year but that's just my opinion. We can push for top 3. If we go into January still in a decent position, I'd expect us to improve the squad and that will get us over the line.

It's a bit of a meaningless statement this early in the season. Barnet would have been in the top seven if they'd beaten us. But we beat them, so they're not. (I know, insert comment about aunties and uncles here.)

What counts is the ability to decide the really tight games in our favour, and we've struggled to do that for years. Even in the NL days, I'm convinced that if we'd beaten Wrexham at the Racecourse Ground, we'd have been spared the play-offs. It's a habit that has held us back since too, and a couple of "statement wins" as @theAnticlough puts it would really breed confidence that it could be our year.