What about Bristol C Blackburn Watford and Stoke?Current Top 10 played away (5):
Ipswich, Preston, Leeds, West Brom, Hull - 2 points
Current Top 10 played at home (2):
Middlesbrough, Southampton - 1 point
Current Bottom 10 played away (1):
Birmingham - 0 points
Current Bottom 10 played home (5)
Millwall, Sheffield W, Huddersfield, Norwich, Swansea - 9 points
We haven't played Stoke yet. Bristol City, Watford and Blackburn are not in top 10 or bottom 10What about Bristol C Blackburn Watford and Stoke?
But why leave them out of the analysis?We haven't played Stoke yet. Bristol City, Watford and Blackburn are not in top 10 or bottom 10
Based on an earlier comment on 'lower ranking sides' i think. If that's the case, bottom 10 is a pretty generous definition of that I feel.But why leave them out of the analysis?
We are very much a work in progress and the first 16 games have been more of a wakeup call than I anticipated. We have played well on occasions but you can see the teams who have spent years in the championship are far more streetwise than we are. We need to learn fast because those clubs below us who have changed their manager could well improve now.I hope I'm being overly-pessimistic but I don't think it's been a promising start.
There seems a consensus on here that we have been playing well and have been unlucky not to get more points.
I wish I could see it like that. For me, almost every week we are conceding far more chances than we create and have a worrying tendency to spend long periods of most matches pinned in our own third.
When we've won points it's mostly been through a combination of scoring absolute screamers, desperate defending and the opposition missing sitters and/or making bad defensive errors. I don't think that is going to happen enough for us to regularly pick up points, hence we have lost half our games and can't put a string of results together
Unless something changes, I think we will be right in the relegation battle and whether or not we stay up probably depends on whether new managers can turn the teams below us around.
But isn't your fourth paragraph exactly the point?I hope I'm being overly-pessimistic but I don't think it's been a promising start.
There seems a consensus on here that we have been playing well and have been unlucky not to get more points.
I wish I could see it like that. For me, almost every week we are conceding far more chances than we create and have a worrying tendency to spend long periods of most matches pinned in our own third.
When we've won points it's mostly been through a combination of scoring absolute screamers, desperate defending and the opposition missing sitters and/or making bad defensive errors. I don't think that is going to happen enough for us to regularly pick up points, hence we have lost half our games and can't put a string of results together
Unless something changes, I think we will be right in the relegation battle and whether or not we stay up probably depends on whether new managers can turn the teams below us around.
But isn't your fourth paragraph exactly the point?
These are sides that don't defend well and miss chances to score, that's why we beat them and there's enough of them to keep our heads above water. It's just that so far we've played a disproportionate number of the top sides.
Given we have a positive goal difference and a very nearly equal Xg for and against I think it is hard to say we deserve to be so low in the table. The game is all about creating chances and scoring goals and preventing them at the other end. We do all that about equally suggesting a mid table performance but without the rub of the green that means we are scoring goals when it counts (which to be fair we had in spades last season)I don't think you can attribute our record so far to the fixture list. There's only seven teams we haven't yet played and two of them are in the top six. The difficulty level of the games we've played so far is probably marginally higher than average but not enough to skew our points tally or league position, and it isn't going to get noticeably easier.
To put it in pretty stark terms, you can either think that our performances have been better than our results, in which case it's logical to think that results will improve. Or you can think, as I do, that results have largely reflected performances (if anything, I think we've been slightly fortunate to get as many points as we have) in which case we're probably on course for a sub 50 points tally unless we improve.