According to the 2023 table; Villa are sitting in 2nd place on 85 points after 42 games (only 8 points behind Man City). It doesn’t seem to be a fluke/short-term thing. This is their level.
We’d need to improve and they’d need to falter for us to overtake them.
Though I know a league campaign is much shorter than a calendar year, so it could swing the other way too.
Emery will take the Conference League very seriously and I don’t think their squad is deep enough. Thankfully. I’d expect Spurs to finish above Villa.
Why is Villa’s calendar year evidence that this is now their level, whereas our league season just gone is an outlier? Especially given a league season is actually a good measure, and a calendar year means nothing?
It seems a bit harsh towards us, and overly generous towards Villa to assume that being the second best side in the country is now Villa’s level.
If we can avoid injuries, we’ll finish above Aston Villa but behind Man City and Liverpool.
The only other team that could finish above us is spurs who, despite having several first team injuries including Maddison, are still up there.
I should clarify.
August to December 2022 I consider to be an outlier for us; we were on pace for a 100-point season during that period. I think we played only ~17 EPL games during that period. Almost no club in world football hits that level, so it likely wasn’t sustainable even if Partey and Saliba were fit all season.
January - December 2023 is a much larger dataset to make conclusions from. A full calendar year, 42 EPL games is enough in my view to see what a team is really like; at that point, each team has played each other at least twice, in some cases three times.
FWIW, I think the 2023 calendar year shows the level of every team tbh. Chelsea, Utd, Newcastle… everyone.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the season ends exactly how that 2023 table looks, unless someone above us has a complete meltdown.
All I’m saying is to be two points (maybe five by tonight) off top spot at halfway through the season is no bad place to be. Ask anyone below us.
Fuck those west ham and Fulham and west ham games, we should be thinking we are still 1 point clear even if Liverpool win tonight.
What a horrendous 6 points dropped.
Yups! After that Liverpool draw at Anfirld; I was pretty convinced we’d best both Fulham and West Ham. But to walk away with zero points is abysmal.
And we still have so many tough away grounds to go to.
That’s why dropping points like we have in the last 2 just kills you, you know you can’t get them back and after Anfield the schedule opened up for us it was time to go on a run if we wanted to become champions.
We’ll drop our fair share of points at City, Spurs, Man United and Brighton on the run in.
And that’s after Spurs went on that continuous run of losses as well.
Its almost always the case that the best teams have high xg differential like that… for lots of explainable and reasonable reasons…
I think the thing to realize is that we have not played great for most of season tbf and yet we are in the mix - we have scope to improve our football and should (not saying it is guaranteed, it never is)…
If we get on form again and start firing and then start to get people like Partey, Timber, et al. back for the final stretch, we should be solidly in 3rd at worst and possibly 2nd or even top despite how hopeless it looks atm.
