Stat Man- A Look At Last Season's Result
By Tom Bason
September 16 2010
With the game against Tottenham fast approaching, I realized we scored a massive 16% of our entire points total last season against them. Then I was wondering against what level of teams we tended to get our points from. Here are the results.
Firstly I broke last season’s final Premier League table down into five sections- ‘Title Challengers’, ‘European Bound’, ‘Mid-table Bores’, ‘Battling Relegation’ and ‘Facing The Drop’. I realise that teams League positions are constantly changing, but with five distinct sections it seemed appropriate to take the final League positions. I’ve also guessed at the amount of points we would have expected to get from these sub sections. These are outlined here:
Title Challengers: 0 Points (Any point is a bonus)
European Bound: 5 points (Draw the home games, lose the away)
Mid Table Bores: 9 points (Win 3, draw 3)
Battling Relegation: 12 points (Win home, draw away
Facing The Drop: 14 points (Win 4, draw 2)
Total: 40 points
Title Challengers
| Team | Home Result | Away Result | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chelsea | 0-2 | 0-4 | 0 pts 0 pts/game |
| Man Utd | 0-1 | 0-3 | |
| Arsenal | 1-4 | 0-1 | |
| Total | 0 pts | 0 pts | |
| Average | 0 pts/game | 0 pts/game |
This one’s pretty easy to look at- we lost every game. With a bit of luck we could have taken a point from The Emirates or in the home games against Manchester United and Chelsea, but as I said earlier- anything from these games is an unexpected bonus.
Euro Bound
| Tottenham | 1-0 | 1-0 | 11 pts 1.1 pts/game |
| Man City | 0-3 | 0-1 | |
| Aston Villa | 1-1 | 2-2 | |
| Liverpool | 0-0 | 0-2 | |
| Everton | 0-0 | 1-1 | |
| Total | 6 pts | 5 pts | |
| Average | 1.2 pts/game | 1 pt/game |
Surprisingly, this was a very profitable group for us. Two wins against Tottenham obviously helped, but we were also unbeaten against Everton and Aston Villa and were competitive in every game except Man City at home. I believe we won so many points as we could go into the games defensively as very little was expected of us, and this is the highest level of team we have the ability to just contain.
Mid Table Bores
| Birmingham | 0-1 | 1-2 | 10 pts 1 pt/game |
| Blackburn | 1-1 | 1-3 | |
| Stoke | 0-0 | 2-2 | |
| Fulham | 2-1 | 0-0 | |
| Sunderland | 2-1 | 2-5 | |
| Total | 8 pts | 2 pts | |
| Average | 1.6 pts/game | 0.4 pt/game |
We just about exceeded expectations in this group, helped by a strong home record- losing only to Birmingham, and beating Fulham and Sunderland. Away from home we were poor though, winning just two points and conceding 12 goals along the way.
Battling Relegation
| Bolton | 2-1 | 0-1 | 9 pts 1.5 pts/game |
| Wigan | 0-2 | 1-0 | |
| West Ham | 0-2 | 3-1 | |
| Total | 3 pts | 6 pts | |
| Average | 1 pt/game | 2 pts/game |
Away from home- very good. At home- needs improvement. Poor home results against Wigan and West Ham could have been costly, but the win at the Boleyn Ground was arguably the most important of the season. This is the group that we would be placed in and this season we need to do better, especially at home, against the teams directly around us.
Facing The Drop
| Burnley | 2-0 | 2-1 | 8 pts 1.33 pts/game |
| Hull | 1-1 | 2-2 | |
| Portsmouth | 0-1 | 1-3 | |
| Total | 4 pts | 4 pts | |
| Average | 1.3 pts/game | 1.3 pts/game |
Losing twice to Portsmouth was unacceptable, although the defeat at Fratton Park came with survival guaranteed. These teams, who struggled all season really should be games which we look to take maximum points from, especially at Molineux.
Overall, we won a lot of our points against teams who possibly underestimated us. Spurs certainly did that twice but are unlikely to make the same mistake again. I can’t see us taking six points from Tottenham again, and so we need to look at other areas to take points from. We took just 7 points from 6 home games against the bottom of the table- that is definitely something that needs to be improved on.
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I would be looking for 12 points from the bottom 3, 8+ from the next 3 relegation battlers and 10+ from the mid-table group again. This would give us 40 points. A measely 5 points from the top 8 would put us in danger of relegation.
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