Evening, Found these the total points over the last 5 seasons for the Championship winners: 2010/2011 - QPR - 88 points 2009/2010 - Newcastle - 102 2008/2009 - Wolverhampton - 90 2007/2008 - West Brom - 81 2006/2007 - Sunderland - 88 Mean: 89.8 (90 points) Mode: 88 Median: 88 Looks like 88 points is the key. With one game left this half and 44 points looks like we are in good stead. That is 15 wins from 24 games. Although the form needs to pick up a little bit. Some prayers to the football gods from all of you please!
I would have liked 108 points for the season, I got very excited once playing with predictions, it all seemed possible. Main aim is to get Auto, Winning the league would be the icing on the cake. IF you gave me odds of 1000/1 this time last year of being top most of the season by Christmas I would have had a speculative tenner on it but would never have expected it.
I'm sure you meant that to be reassuring, but it's got me a little worried. It means we have to improve a little for the second half of the season (at the least) which could be hard. Unless we get some new players, we are asking a lot of the present team to step up their game. The only good point is that this is true of our rivals as well. Please Santa give me a large gap between second and third.
It won't need to be 15 wins. 13 wins and some draws will be fine! 24 games 13 wins 6 draws 5 defeats = Saints on 89 points 12 home games left, win all of them and they only need to win one away from home and draw 6 others.
Surely you need the points for the runners up as well as in theory they maybe 10 points behind the winners.
Interesting that when Newcastle went up with their massive score of 102 points, the second spot had 91 points. Before I checked I was sure that 2nd spot that year would be a low score as Newcastle dominated.
It's interesting reading, but I'm sticking firmly to my two-points-per-game target if we want automatic. Yes, clearly in previous seasons much less than 92 points would have been enough (e.g. 80), but that wont always be the case. But it would almost be unheard of to fail to get automatic with 92 points - not to mention that it would give us a more than decent chance of winning the division. Right now, we are absoloutely right bang on target for 92 points. So if we continue to win our home games, and draw our away games, we'll get there (I'm not saying that this will be easy mind you - although then again, once January is over, our home fixtures do look very, very kind: Burnley, Derby, Ipswich, Barnsley, Doncaster, Pompey, Reading, Coventry)
I think Nigel would like us to slip down the table a bit in January, so that we can then take the league by storm again like we did last year, and win our last 6 games. P.S. I am joking. I agree with Jen, clinch promotion by early April, say the 7th. I wonder who we're playing that day?
As great as that would be, an alternative could be clinching promotion on the last day. Saints, who rejected SISU's advances, win and get promoted whilst the losers Coventry, who accepted SISU's advances, get relegated.
I think the total needed will be lower this season. Lots of teams beating each other means it will stay tight right through to May. Can't see any teams breaking away as in the last few seasons much as I'd love us to!
Just shows how costly this little blip in form has been. Saints could be sitting on something like 48-50 points easily, at this time, and still have had a little blip. We know these things happen. It has just made it harder to get over the line. Hence, EVERY GAME, from the first to the last, IS A MUST WIN. Remember that conversation we had..? Now do the doubters see why it's so important..?
I think that West Ham are likely to win the league with the extra quality in their squad, but there is no reason why we can't get automatic promotion (if we can sign a quality striker in January). 81 points is a total that would've secured a place in the top 2 in this division for the last 4 seasons. I feel that it's likely to be close to that figure again with so many teams dropping points to each other in this unpredictable league, our advantage is that we already have 'points on the board'.
Blips happen to the best of sides. We just came up from League One FFS, we must expect to lose a few games.
