up the football league we go! my works night out tonight, spent in the company of amazingly hot ladies, free booze, top draw food and city win. just try and dampen this mood, i dare you?
sounds good doesn't it? and even if Palace, Boro and Cardiff all win today we are in the mix. I'm busy booking advanced train tickets to get decent prices for the rest of the season. we have hit our stride earlier than 07/08. fingers crossed for some strengthening in January and reasonable luck with injuries and suspensions. On the suspensions front we have the best discipline record in the league: no reds, least fouls, 2nd least yellows (Wolves have less, but they have had 2 reds).
We need to replicate the same in the 2nd half of the season. A few stats: 44 points at half way. last season reading and southampton finished in automatic places on 89 and 88 points. the season before QPR won it with 88 points and norwich went up on 84 points in 2nd place. Not sure what kind of tally we will need this season. But considering it's quite tight up top (unlike 3 season ago where newcastle finished 22points ahead of 3rd place and west brom 12 points ahead) I expect a high 80's total would be sufficient. In our promotion season we finished 3rd on 75 points (that's just 31 points away from what we have now) That same year stoke won it on 81 points and west brom finished second on 79! quite a low year. Quite a promising stat is the following... At his stage of the season in our promotion season we were on 37 points. So we are 7 points better off which is quite something. We did go on a great run that season in march and overall in the second half of the season. But in theory if we have a similar 2nd half of the season we should reach the 80 point mark... depending on what kind of year it is that may be enough for automatic places.
It was the other way round mate- when we went up West Brom were champions and Stoke came second. But i'm just nit picking. If we do well, well better than we have so far, in the head to head against the top 7 we'll do fine.
Oh misread that got confused... Knock on wood we don't somehow collapse... It would be more unlikely for us to do so than for us to keep roughly this pace. Maybe we don't get 44 points in the second half but we need 12 wins out of 23 matches to reach 80 points. More than possible. 80 may not be enough to go up but it's a good target. Let's hope we boost our team in january, aluko comes back and we carry on.