Mr Angry The last 3 games have shown that you can post as many stats, focus on as many trends, consider how much having a certain goal difference at this stage of the season relates to where you finally finish in the League, and it all means - as I and many others - have said before - absolutely nothing when your team come against teams that are better than you where it matters, on the field of play.
Not so. Until recently our stats included playing more or less every club once. Those same stats have fairly clearly showed that we were winning against teams in the lower two thirds and not beating teams in the top six. or do you, dearest, dispute that?
Our stats suggested that we'd finish on 69 points. That was almost certainly not going to be enough. BUT.
The "BUT" is that our stats included (a) a poor start (7 points dropped from the first 12 points), included (b) a time when no striker could score a goal in open play, and (c) the first half of the season involved us playing without a dominant midfielder and playing mostly 451 which clearly didn't suit our main striker.
(a) We overcame the bad start and picked up extra point to get us up to better than 1.5 ppg
(b) Hunt started scoring, Church started scoring, and most particularly Long started scoring and now is in the form of his life.
(c) We signed Elwood and were able to settle in 442.
Elwood playing is still undefeated, and if we maintain the total "ppg" (2.09) he has so far achieved (15 games) we should finish on 73 points
PLUS anything we get from the Sheffield game.
If you ignore the cup games then his ppg is fractionally lower (1.89) and we'd then end up on 70 points plus what we get from Sheffield.
Our main problem has been against top six sides. There are 12 games against the top six and we have already played ten of those. That is hardly "trivial". Our position looks a little worse than it is because, close-together we have played games where it was always likely we would get few point. We do not have to play QPR again (2 defeats) We do not have to play Swansea again (2 defeats) We do not have to play Cardiff or Norwich again (9 points dropped).
Our record against the others in this league is EXCELLENT = P20 W10 D7 L3 40-22 GD18 37 Points from 20 games = 1,85 ppg (Many of those WITHOUT ElwoodThat means we ought to reasonably expect RFC to get 1.85 ppg in the next 16 games. That would give us 73 points. The variables are (a) Elwood isn't playing at Sheffield and we have two top six games left (and Karacan out for three games)... There is the little matter of confidence, too. None of the last four results individually is a bad result, but as a block of 4 it could damge confidence.
Its equally rubbish to bleat about who those 3 games were against; that suggest that for all the pseudo-scientific BS, the stats king didn't factor in relative strengths of opponents!!!! How flawed does THAT make all of his previous postings?
Don't be a moron. It is YOU who is making the basic error. You won't find a post from me saying something like "We've averaged 1.5 ppg so far and "THEREFORE" we will get 6 points from Hull-Cardiff-QPR-Norwich."
That isn't how it works. This block (February's games) started with Cardiff and was Cardiff-QPR-Norwich-
Sheffield-Watford-Millwall-Palace. The question is NOT "will we beat Cardiff?" It's will we get 10 or 11 points from these SEVEN games? Always was that. A win at Cardiff or draws from QPR or Norwich and life would be easier. Now it's really tough, but it's
POSSIBLE for us to get 13 from the 7 (DLLWWWW) (promotion form) or 11 DLLWWDW. And that's how to judge it. Not knee-jerking because we failed (very narrowly) not to WDD against three excellent sides) but what happens in THE MONTH. Where will we be with 12 games to go?
If we are not on 50+ at the end of February we've made it nigh on impossible, meaning we need a minimum of 8 points from the next four games. That's NOT good, not great, but we'd still probably only need 2 ppg for the rest of the season. We need to stop the rot immediately, of course, and that really means winning at Sheffield (4 points from 4 games) then winning at home (7 points from 5 games, and back on track.) Then we need to win one of the remaining two games.
As Weybridge has said - in 3 games Snowball has gone from posting how the trends suggest we will get 3rd or 4th, (as did the GD, as did the position of the Moon relative to Uranus), to now saying that unless we win the next game, all bets are off (which, ironically, is equally as stupid; whats to say that after a defeat to Shef Utd, we then win 5 or 6 games out of 7 and suddenly all bets are "on" again?). Unbelievable.
I posted that the trend line pointed to 3rd/4th. I didn't say I believed we'd make 3rd/4th
The change isn't "unbelievable" OR illogical. It's common sense. We were averaging a little over 1.5 ppg, probably not quite enough. We had no room for error. We have to be on 1.5 ppg for the season with six games left to have ANY chance. That is we'd need to be on 60 points with 18 left to play for.
As the season-left gets shorter and shorter every dropped point becomes a bigger deal. So why "MUST" we win at Sheffield?
Say we lose. We will then have 15 games and even if we average 2 points per game (better than QPR's season to date) we'd finish on 72 points, which might not be enough. More importantly we would be looking at a horrible run of DDLLL and confidence would be shot. I have said we had to win at EITHER Norwich or Sheffield.
There's no "moving goalposts". It's re-assessing the requirements based on the latest knowledge.
IMO we need to W6 D2 of our home games, and win at Sheffield, Scunthorpe, Palace, Coventry (32 Points taking us to 74) and get some more points if we can from Barnsley, Ipswich, Forest, Leeds.
It will be VERY difficult to beat Watford, Leicester and Millwall at the MadStad but we must have a decent chance of beating Preston, Derby, Sheffield, Portsmouth, Boro.
Yes I know, THEORETICALLY we could lose our next 5 then win 11 on the trot and end up on 75, but I prefer the real world.
Start with a win at Sheffield, manage to beat Watford. Then, suddenly We have W2 D1 L2 in 5 (7 points) and we are two points above Watford, with a better GD.
Then beat Millwall. I am
NOT saying we will do that but
IF we do, that will be 10 points from 6 games in February and we've hurt two rivals. Even
a draw at Palace (11 points in Feb) would look OK then, but a fourth win (13 from 7) and we'd look really, really on fire.
