How should Millwall approach the final four games &#8211; and should that change if top two is out of reach?

HOW would you approach the final four games of the season?

Would you want to stick with the core players who got you there and ensure they stay in a good rhythm? Do you rotate heavily to preserve legs for the play-offs and avoid injuries? Would you go all out for the top two?

There are a few ways Alex Neil could approach the run-in. The rhetoric from Calmont Road has always been the same: we want to go into every game aiming to extract the maximum amount of points.

That makes sense given the current situation.

Ipswich Town's slip on Tuesday night against Portsmouth has suddenly made the gap to second look far less intimidating. Sure, if Ipswich win their game in hand, then it is a five-point gap with four games to go. Not insurmountable, but a big ask. But look at who they have to play.

First, Middlesbrough, licking their wounds after a run of seven games without a win saw them fall out of the top two. Three days later, away to Charlton Athletic, who have claimed some big scalps this season, then three days after an early kick-off against West Bromwich Albion, who will be fighting for their lives after reports they might get docked points for violating P&S (profit and sustainability) rules.

To top it all off, they then take on the most in-form team in the league, Southampton at Saint Mary's, and end the season at home to Queens Park Rangers.

They will barely have a chance to catch a breather.

If the Lions can stay within touching distance until the final day, absolutely bring out the big guns, stick with what got you there and see what happens. The fact that they are near-certain of a play-off spot is remarkable in itself, but going up via automatic promotion would have been beyond the dreams of even the most optimistic Millwall fan last summer.

What counts as the 'big guns' is debatable. There are certainly players who seem to be undroppable when fit and available: Anthony Patterson, Alfie Doughty, Jake Cooper, Caleb Taylor, Tristan Crama, Billy Mitchell, Casper De Norre, Femi Azeez, and Camiel Neghli. Josh Coburn looks to be entering that territory as well.

That's ten right there who would likely start in a play-off final, with the eleventh dependent on whether he opts for a 4-2-3-1 or 4-4-2.

Neil is not Claudio Ranieri, who rarely rotated that Premier-League winning side of 2015-16, but he does have his trusted lieutenants.

How does he view rotation?

"We always make little tweaks depending on the personnel, and the reason is that not all personnel have the same qualities and the same traits," Neil told NewsAtDen . "We'll change how we build depending on who's in the team.

"But it's literally whether we played with a flat left back or we played with a high left back, or whether we played with Femi [Azeez] wide off the right, or we played with Aidomo [Emakhu] wide off the left. Those sorts of things have changed how we've built across the season. But our principles remain the same, if that makes any sense. We'll vary it from bit to bit.

"I think getting into these games that are coming up, depending on what the landscape looks like in terms of play-offs, top two, all of that sort of stuff, then naturally I'd start to take a view on getting ourselves prepared if we need to. But we've still got work to do. We've got a big game Saturday. We need to go and try to win that first and foremost."

While the conversation remains on how Millwall should be set up to maximise their chances of winning heading into the final four games, that may very well shift by Leicester (away) on the penultimate weekend of the season.

If top-two is out of reach, then the focus shifts to rhythm versus protecting legs. Neil has talked about getting players into the habit of winning, something they will want to carry into the play-offs, but on the other hand, Sunderland lost their last five heading into the play-offs last year and did just fine.

Neil has also shown he is willing to rotate before in cup games and is pragmatic about preserving players who are higher risk. Perhaps it will be done on a player-by-player basis.

I would look to preserve some of the more fragile players and keep the rest in the starting eleven. The likes of Camiel Neghli, Jake Cooper, Caleb Taylor, Tristan Crama, and Mihailo Ivanovic have shown they can play twice a week without picking up knocks or niggles, and keeping them in top shape would be helpful.

Then, bringing in the likes of Thierno Ballo, Luke Cundle, Barry Bannan, Macaulay Langstaff, and Derek Mazou-Sacko to pick up minutes to freshen them up ahead of the play-offs would give them more impetus off the bench in those high-impact games.