S9M14 & 15: Gloom & Doom

So Maureen's back. Loves a bit of drama does Mo. Comes in. Bish 3-0 up. Bosh. gives up 2 goals. Box Office.

Arsenal, on the other hand are not box office. They're more like a sitcom. Get the viewers and everyone knows the ending already. Car Crash. I've personally never seen anything like that Lacazette equaliser. He looked gutted to have got a point, knowing it would prolong the manager's dead reign. I'm gonna speak medically here. He is pulseless. No brain activity. Lungs have deflated. Only Arsenal would manage to balls up being good, being average and now being bad.

We then hit a run of 5 away wins, which is a nice little statistical streak. Wolves, Leicester, Liverpool, Norwich & Burnley all won away at 3pm on a Saturday. In fact, had Lacazette not scored with the last kick, it would have been a clean sweep of away wins. I have no idea of how rare that is, but it feels pretty rare. Like Epoch defining. We live in marvellous times.

Man City broke the streak with a vital win for them to keep up theoretical pressure on Liverpool over a resurgent Chelsea. Not to fear however, because the Mancunian comedy was, as ever these days, provided by their Salfordian neighbours who really are excellent human beings showing such empathy with their late 90s/early 00s rivals.

Aston Villa then won a game that everyone had forgotten about in the Steve Bruce return. Honestly, if 14 year old me had thought I'd be bored by 4 days of football...

Let's get statty:

This week, 23 people played
Most popular predicted results: Arsenal WIN & Liverpool WIN (23/23)
Most disputed result: Bournemouth vs Wolves (11-6-6 split respectively)

Highest odds: Steven Daniels (4937/1)
Lowest odds: Josh Daniels (539/1)
Average odds: 1193/1

Best predictors: Loads of you (6/10)
Worst predictors: Loads of us (3/10)
Average score: 4.5/10

Best predicted result: Liverpool WIN (23/23)
Worst predicted results: Arsenal vs Southampton DRAW & Norwich WIN (0/23)

Everyone's result:

On this: There's often a lot of consternation about this. For reasons that I don't know (and there may well be a simple fix), when you download this from google sheets, it only puts every other name on the x axis. You will see that there are bars with no names attached. As in previous years, it goes RD-Lawro-ECI-WSC and then in alphabetical order (First name-Last name). Your letter codes are the same as in the leaderboard. Because no shows are included in the graph to shame them, the order should stay the same every week, unless new players start. Hopefully this reduces some of the anxiety around receipt of your predictions. A message is displayed on the form to tell you that you have successfuly submitted.

Leaderboard (>2/3 available weeks; 9/13)

To this week's predictions...

I'm putting up the weekend predictions and the midweek predictions for next week because I'm organised and stuff. Blog up next week for the next weekend fixtures will hopefully have results, but can't promise I'll turn it around in time.

M14 Predos:

M15 Predos:



Good luck all

S9M13: Done before the frost?

Well I'm back to this freezing miserable land where I was drenched with rain before I'd got into the terminal from the stairs. Like 40 metres. What's the deal with that? Dinosaur typing and no jettys. I also missed the ECI predictions again, so if anyone knows them, it would be great it they had an archive sorted...

Let's chat...

I have no idea what happened in football other than Liverpool have won the league and Arsenal are trash who refuse to pull the trigger on their trash manager. Feel free to fill in whatever blanks you like. Think there was international football of no significance but couldn't tell you anything about it other than England *surprisingly* qualified for a tournament that they may have already qualified for if I understood how the Nations League worked. 

***HOLD THE PRESSES*** (Ed: Idiot. You just edit the blog after publishing)

Wowsers. Who saw the Poch news coming? I mean yeah he's been moaning for ages and results and performances haven't been great, and it's felt like a breakup was in the offing but didn't see that coming this week. My initial reaction was one of joy. He's a great coach and created something special that will be tough for anyone else, let alone Mourinho to replicate. That's a quite frankly ludicrous appointment where you've taken an older prototype of the Poch model without the emotional buy-in, with loads of narcissism and paid him double. Plus no doubt transfer backing and if that's the case, why not buy players for Poch in the last 2 years. Unless there's a big sale coming - which could only be Kane or Son - but that's a squad that probably needs 5 or 6 new names so let's see how that pans out.

My more considered reaction is that this is further evidence to my theory that managers have a 10 year era to hit their peak, and then they get overhauled. The exception to this was Ferguson, although 1) different football era and 2) he was a tactical chameleon and refreshed his backroom staff with many other coaches don't do - they come as a coaching unit - his strength was man management more than tactical rigour. Poch has peaked as a coach - his ideas aren't fresh. That's not to say they can't be successful - a better resourced squad might help, but there's an internal fatigue and an external "working out" that occurs and I think that point came at Spurs last year. The CL campaign was a final hurrah as a sticking plaster and he probably should have gone in the summer. Let's see how he does after a break on his estancia to recharge and I'm sure he'll end up somewhere decent. Like N5. #EmeryOut

Okey dokey, let's double stat recap:

Matchday 11:

This week, 26 people played

Most popular predicted result: Man City WIN (26/26)

Most disputed predicted result: Everton vs Spurs (5-7-14 split respectively)

Highest odds: AFM (2691/1)

Lowest odds: Aron Kleiman (311/1)

Average odds: 1118/1

Best predictors: Nick Taylor-Collins, David Brickman & WhoScored.com (7/10)

Worst predictor: Hillel Chemel (3/10)

Average score: 4.27/10

Best predicted result: Man City WIN (26/26)

Worst predicted result: Arsenal vs Wolves DRAW & Newcastle WIN (1/26 - Will O'Doherty & Jeremy Godley respectively with the plaudits)

Matchday 12:

This week, 25 people played

Most popular predicted result: Chelsea WIN (25/25)

Most disputed predicted result: Newcastle vs Bournemouth (8-10-7 split retrospectively)

Highest odds: AFM (5722/1)

Lowest odds: Josh Daniels (1862/1)

Average odds: 3509/1

Best predictor: Ryan Wain (8/10)

Worst predictor: Joe Abbott (3/10)

Average score: 5.72/10

Best predicted result: Chelsea WIN (25/25)

Worst predicted result: Spurs vs Sheff Utd DRAW (3/25)

Everyone's results: 

Leaderboard (>2/3 weeks, 9/12)

To this week's predos:

Good luck all!

S9M12: Foreign Correspondent

So I'd planned to do the blog this week on my flight but long story short, to use a laptop effectively you need to have arms like T-Rex

So I gave up and will double blog next week.

This week's predos:

Good luck all