Yes it would them below us, prevent a team close to us picking up points and put another team closer to the relegation zone than us. All at once
Hopefully we improve on my predicted 8 now. Really hope Norwich pick up a win before we play them too.
The two players that made the difference, in this fixture last season, iirc, are no longer with Villa - Grealish and Barkley. No reason why we can’t win this one.
To be honest,I was the six points against Villa and Norwich but I am also hopng Norwich beat Leeds tomorrow - just to male the relegation battle more interesting. I am hoping that Newcastle's position by Christmas will be such that they are already doomed.
I have no doubt that Newcastle will get relegated and I have a feeling Leeds will be jining them. It will be interesting to see where Bentford are by Christmas too.
I fully expect Norwich to win today and try and force their way back into contention, they have Brentford next and then us. Similar to this thread they will be looking for 7 points from their next 3
10 out of 12 so far with just Norwich to play. Weird how we've kept 3 clean sheets in 3 games and then conceded 2 to Burnley of all teams.
Just because I'm bored and trying to kill time before I go away for the week I'm going to compare our results from the teams we've played to last season. Everton (a) 1-3 1-1 -1 point Man United (h) 1-1 2-3 +1 point Newcastle (a) 2-2 2-3 +1 point West Ham (h) 0-0 0-0 No gain/loss Man City (a) 0-0 2-5 +1 point Wolves (h) 0-1 2-3 No gain/loss Chelsea (a) 1-3 3-3 -1 point Leeds (h) 1-0 0-2 +3 points Burnley (h) 2-2 3-2 -2 points Watford (a) 1-0 N/A N/A Villa (h) 1-0 0-1 +3 points So compared to last season, we've got a net gain of 5 points. That's pretty good given who we've played IMO. The stat that I really like is that we conceded 23 goals from those games last season. This season - 12. And half of those were right at the start of the season. That's a massive improvement and it's given us a great base to build on. If you can shut teams out you've got a great chance of winning.