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The season starts now.


hypochondriac
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Brighton haven't won a game since September and have recently lost to Villa, drawn with Norwich and Newcastle.

Leicester are crap this season. Arsenal have been pulling out good results and seemed more solid although were taken apart yesterday. 

Palace are random. Miles better than the start of the season but still prone to letting in goals as they did yesterday.

It's a harder set of fixtures than the last lot but not that bad.

 

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So, a third of the way through the season and we're nestled in 13th place, 3 points behind 8th, 1 point behind Everton and Leicester, and ahead of Leeds and Aston Villa.

Hands up who wouldn't have taken that at the start of the season as we head into December.

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9 hours ago, Turkish said:

Despite yesterday’s disappointment a good return from the last 5

now we go onto 

liverpool

brighton

leicester

arsenal

palace

Can’t see much more than 5-6 points from those. 

Certainly makes yesterday’s result a tad more concerning. 

Could easily be in the bottom 3 after that run of games, which would put added pressure on the Christmas / new year fixtures, which it’s seems like we never tend to do all that well in. 

6 points would be a great return, if I’m honest. 

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1 hour ago, trousers said:

So, a third of the way through the season and we're nestled in 13th place, 3 points behind 8th, 1 point behind Everton and Leicester, and ahead of Leeds and Aston Villa.

Hands up who wouldn't have taken that at the start of the season as we head into December.

<Hands up>

But I wouldn't have taken it just before kick off yesterday, and certainly not 4 minutes after kick off. 🙁

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1 hour ago, Dman said:

Certainly makes yesterday’s result a tad more concerning. 

Could easily be in the bottom 3 after that run of games, which would put added pressure on the Christmas / new year fixtures, which it’s seems like we never tend to do all that well in. 

6 points would be a great return, if I’m honest. 

6 points from that would be great!

Would put us at 20 points with a couple of games to play before hitting the halfway point in the season. 

Edited by SaintTex
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14 hours ago, Turkish said:

Despite yesterday’s disappointment a good return from the last 5

now we go onto 

liverpool

brighton

leicester

arsenal

palace

Can’t see much more than 5-6 points from those. 

Struggling to see where we get 3 points if I'm honest.

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3 hours ago, Micky said:

Struggling to see where we get 3 points if I'm honest.

Brighton aren't in good form, Leicester have been a shadow of last season's side, and Arsenal aren't anything special in spite of a bit of a recovery. Palace look a handful, but they're still just Crystal Palace at the end of the day.

Apart from the Liverpool game, I think we can compete in all the others. 

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13 hours ago, Lighthouse said:

Aside from Liverpool those teams are 5th, 9th, 10th and 12th. There're points in those games, if we play as well as we have been recently.

I tend to agree to a certain degree, but the problem is, we play well but don't score, first half on Saturday was a case in point - should've been more than one up.  Arguably we should've beaten Chelsea in the cup - but we just didn't take our chances.  I don't think our performances are bad, but we lack goals and we are always likely to concede due to stupid mistakes.

Edited by Micky
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58 minutes ago, hypochondriac said:

To be honest I'd probably take a point a game which would keep us above the relegation zone and out of trouble. Five points minimum please but we can achieve more. 

Absolutely this.  5 more points gets us to 19 after 17 games.  Not as good as last year, but almost certainly good enough to be comfortably clear of the drop zone.

Edited by Alanh
Typo
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I reckon 5-8 points from that run.

Should beat atleast one of Brighton, Leicester, Palace and get atleast a draw against another of them. Then a point from one of Liverpool or Arsenal feels possible. I will conservatively say 5 pts. Win at Brighton, draw at palace and Arsenal, loss to the other two.

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  • 2 weeks later...
13 minutes ago, Turkish said:

2 points from our last 3 games in abysmal considering 2 were at home and we’ve lead on all 3 of them

If we collapse in the second half of this season as badly as we did last season, we are as good as down anyway.  We built a great base last season and then completely imploded, and limped over the line.   This season our base is all sand, there's no cement in this team - we're sinking fast. 

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1 hour ago, Turkish said:

2 points from our last 3 games in abysmal considering 2 were at home and we’ve lead on all 3 of them

True but if we beat Palace then we're still on track for my prediction for these games. Big if obviously. If only we'd beaten Norwich we would be in a great position. 

Edited by hypochondriac
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1 hour ago, Micky said:

If we collapse in the second half of this season as badly as we did last season, we are as good as down anyway.  We built a great base last season and then completely imploded, and limped over the line.   This season our base is all sand, there's no cement in this team - we're sinking fast. 

Yeah I mentioned on another post, we're not actually playing badly. We're playing as well as we did at the start of last season, we just can't score goals (which was going to be obvious as soon as we sold Ings).

We have no breathing space this year. We had a 10 point cushion last season (we had about 24/25 points at this stage). I fear what will happen when we have our genuine dip in form and stop playing well.

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1 hour ago, Micky said:

If we collapse in the second half of this season as badly as we did last season, we are as good as down anyway.

Unfortunately, us and second halves are not a match made in heaven.

Since the second half collapse and defeat at Norwich, a hammering at Liverpool, and now just two points from two winnable home games the upcoming fixtures are looking precarious.

It's too easy for the opposition to work us out - to not be out of site by half time and they then have a real opportunity to rescue the game.

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Talking of losing Ings' goals, by this stage in terms of PL matches played last season, Ings had scored 6, AA and Broja between them have 5 so far this term. Overall, last term we had scored 9 more goals by the 15th match, with Vesty, Romeu, Walcott, and Djenepo all contributing.

Edited by badgerx16
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13 minutes ago, badgerx16 said:

Talking of losing Ings' goals, by this stage in terms of PL matches played last season, Ings had scored 6, AA and Broja between them have 5 so far this term.

It's quite a simplistic way of looking at it, but I genuinely think it does boil down to that. Take Ings 6 goals out of the equation, that removes 6 points from our total at the same stage. And that takes us down to pretty much where we are now points wise.

It was always such a gamble to sell a proven PL goal scorer. I do appreciate that the club say the $$$ was good and decided it was a good deal, but we really cheeped out on the replacement. Should have gone all out for someone like Daka who'd scored goals at a European Level, or even had our scouts aware of Dennis @ Watford who has been excellent for them. It feels unfair on Armstrong really, he needed to replace Ings goals from day one as no one else in our existing squad is capable.

Edited by S-Clarke
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5 minutes ago, S-Clarke said:

It's quite a simplistic way of looking at it, but I genuinely think it does boil down to that. Take Ings 6 goals out of the equation, that removes 6 points from our total at the same stage. And that takes us down to pretty much where we are now points wise.

It was always such a gamble to sell a proven PL goal scorer. I do appreciate that the club say the $$$ was good and decided it was a good deal, but we really cheeped out on the replacement. Should have gone all out for someone like Daka who'd scored goals at a European Level, or even had our scouts aware of Dennis @ Watford who has been excellent for them. It feels unfair on Armstrong really, he needed to replace Ings goals from day one as no one else in our existing squad is capable.

I agree that we maybe should have gone for a more proven replacement than AA, but seling an injury prone player who didn't want to play for us wasn't in itself a bad idea. It's not as if Ings is ripping Villa's opponents a new one.

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20 minutes ago, badgerx16 said:

I agree that we maybe should have gone for a more proven replacement than AA, but seling an injury prone player who didn't want to play for us wasn't in itself a bad idea. It's not as if Ings is ripping Villa's opponents a new one.

selling Ings was a no brainer for the football business. Our financial model does not permit us to allow good players to walk for frees.

Got to spend that money wisely though, and try to get maybe three out of four transfers right. Tough ask. I wonder what the league average is (almost impossible to calculate I suppose) in terms of `transfer success'.

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2 hours ago, Micky said:

If we collapse in the second half of this season as badly as we did last season, we are as good as down anyway.  We built a great base last season and then completely imploded, and limped over the line.   This season our base is all sand, there's no cement in this team - we're sinking fast. 

We have a stronger squad this year with actual depth at full back so *hopefully* we won't implode in the same way. In fact we might get some surprise results when mid table teams have nothing to play for

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On 21/11/2021 at 09:12, Turkish said:

Despite yesterday’s disappointment a good return from the last 5

now we go onto 

liverpool

brighton

leicester

arsenal

palace

Can’t see much more than 5-6 points from those. 

Bizarrely you are still on target for your  seemingly  pessimistic forecast of 5 points. I guess the season starts here all over again? Palace then Brentford, get four points from those two and it doesn’t look so terrible again. 

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7 minutes ago, hypochondriac said:

Unfortunately now we have to beat Palace to stay in line with what I thought were quite realistic predictions. Lose to Palace abd we're really starting to get into trouble. 

Unfortunately the managers and players perspective will be that there are x number of games left each worth three points, totally failing to realise that we are incapable of winning matches against anybody other than the very worst teams.  It'll be a case of far too little to late I'm afraid. 

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2 hours ago, Billy the Kidd said:

I’m confused.

So, is it this week the Season starts? Or next week, or whenever we next win again?

Clearly when we win our next game!  
 

Have you learned nothing from this forum? If you look at the xg*p1(3xz) / hot dog x2 - 4-2-2-2 automated you’d have a better understanding of how good we really are and what a great tactician Ralph is. It becomes really clear that we are one of the best teams ever in the premier league,  if it wasn’t for our dashed rotten luck we’d probably be top, if not higher!

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1 hour ago, Toussaint said:

Clearly when we win our next game!  
 

Have you learned nothing from this forum? If you look at the xg*p1(3xz) / hot dog x2 - 4-2-2-2 automated you’d have a better understanding of how good we really are and what a great tactician Ralph is. It becomes really clear that we are one of the best teams ever in the premier league,  if it wasn’t for our dashed rotten luck we’d probably be top, if not higher!

That isn't what this thread said at all. My point is outlined in the first post and largely it was quite accurate as we had some decent form but sadly we've now dropped off again. I don't think anybody on this forum would ever accuse me of being blindly positive! 

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8 hours ago, Toussaint said:

Bizarrely you are still on target for your  seemingly  pessimistic forecast of 5 points. I guess the season starts here all over again? Palace then Brentford, get four points from those two and it doesn’t look so terrible again. 

On target! We'll need to beat Palace to scrape the 5 points and that aint happening so the pessimistic forecast of 5 points was actually very optimistic.

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13 hours ago, hypochondriac said:

That isn't what this thread said at all. My point is outlined in the first post and largely it was quite accurate as we had some decent form but sadly we've now dropped off again. I don't think anybody on this forum would ever accuse me of being blindly positive! 

I I was only having a bit of a laugh me old mate (trying to), appreciate it doesn't always come across that way in text.

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