Interesting stats: -We played 38 league games in 2013, earning the most points out of all other clubs -Our win ratio for 2013 is only bettered by the 2002 calendar year -Our away form was better than our home form, with 19 away wins, compared to 16 home wins, and 5 away defeats, compared to 6 home defeats. And lot's and lot's of other stats: http://www.arsenal.com/news/features/review-of-2013 Now let's continue and win the title! We have a good run of games coming: Cardiff (h), Villa (a), Fulham (h), Southampton (a), and C. Palace (h). All of them winnable games, if we can win 4 out of 5 of them, it'd be excellent, if we can all 5 of them, even better.
Southampton away is clearly the hardest fixture out of that lot and even they are not the same force as they were a couple months back. Fully expect us to beat the other four teams, and also quietly confident about beating Southampton away as well. Five wins would set us up perfectly for the toughest run of fixtures we had in a long time, when we face the likes of Bayern,City,Man Utd,Everton and Chelsea in a short space of time.
Stats taken from another forum. I haven't checked them but they're pretty cool!! STAT: Since Lewandowski's winner at the Emirates, these 4 have played 588 minutes of football together, and conceded ZERO. STAT: We have conceded 18 goals this season. A third of those was vs City. No team has conceded less goals than us in the PL, it is the joint best record with Everton. STAT: The back 4 of Sagna, Per, Kos & Gibbs has conceded just 9 goals in all competitions this season. That's on average a goal every 161 minutes and 26 seconds. STAT: We have kept 8 PL clean sheets this season. That is a joint best record with Spurs, Everton and West Ham. STAT: Since the Spurs game in March, we have conceded just 23 PL goals. 11 of those goals were from open play. 6 of those goals were conceded vs City. Everton have the next best record with 24 conceded. Our defence got us to 4th place last season and it has got us to the top of the league this season, too. Lets pray they stay fit from now until May. As long as they are all playing, there is little chance of us conceding.
In February we face Pool, United, a possible FA Cup game, then Munich home. In March *gulp* we face Spurs (a), Chelsea (a), City (h), and Everton (a), sandwiched inbetween all that is an away game to Munich. :-D. So as I said on the other thread, beating the likes of United and City at home will be imperative for us, if we drop something like 7-12 points, then forget about winning the league, look how tight it is at the top, you can't expect to be dropping that many points and think you can win the league. We're going to have to beat City-United at home, try to get a point from Chelsea. We should even be beating Spurs, and getting something from Everton.
Our defence in the big games has been good so far this season, obviously City being the exception. We looked good defensively VS Chelsea, we looked good for the most part VS United, shame our attack didn't show up on that day. Kept a clean sheet against Pool who had Suarez, Sturidge, and Gerrard all playing together. Kept a clean sheet VS Dortmund away. So if we can keep that up, things could go good.
Agreed Other than the City game, we've done really well defensively. Bosscielny had Suarez in his back pocket against Pool and in the other games you mention the whole back four looked really solid. That abominable loss to the Spuds in March where we handed them the game with two gifted goals was the low point of the year, but it was the game that finally gave our defensive a kick up the arse and was the catalyst for us finishing above them again. Losing to the spuds was like being bitten by a mosquito, it stung a bit at the time, but then we got angry and splatted it. Since then our defensive has been very solid.
