Lost in the deluge of post-Southampton news, anger and gallows humour, John McCormick applied a scholarly eye to the statistics he considers relevant factors in determining who goes down, who stays up. Ominously, in this update, the 8-0 defeat is seen as not only wrecking our goal difference but pushing us more obviously into the frame, on John’s interpretation of trends. He hopes and we hope he is completely wrong …
We’ve gone three PL games without any forward scoring so it looks like the front line failings we’ve experienced for at least two seasons are destined to continue. Jozy will score one day but Fletch looks like he’s playing the wrong system and Wickham’s playing the wrong position.
This is the latest of John McCormick‘s occasional delve into statistics and logic to weigh up relegation prospects – one day he’ll feel, as Sunderland fan, it’s worth a look at the other end of the table. It has already had an airing and attracted comment from SAFC fans. But what do supporters of the clubs he fears may be doomed think? Is his choice of Hull and Villa harsh, QPR’s inclusion at odds with ‘Arry’s famed powers of survival when given a full season, Sunderland’s exclusion over-optimistic? Have your say …
The average age of our readers has probably been reduced to below 100, thanks to Hayley and Keir, and our brilliantly successful season will no doubt have brought in new readers. Or maybe not, I don’t actually have a clue except for M Salut’s recent post that the site’s had 2.4 million visitors since it opened in 2007. Whatever, it’s likely that some of those 2.4 million hits will be from the parents of football-mad kids who, struck down by World cup fever, will shortly be negotiating bedtimes and giving plaintive cries of “just a bit longer…”
With thanks to Mackftm at YouTube for this gem
My local paper in France runs a French-language version of the lyrics of John Lennon’s Imagine, changed to reflect Jonny Wilkinion’s career-concluding match, donning the red and black of Toulon for the last time in combat for the French championship final at the Stade de France tonight. You can say John McCormick‘s a dreamer, too. He has let his imagination run riot. Not content with allowing an excess of Merlot to induce a vote for Chile in our grand World Cup ‘other team’ poll, he now conducts a musical review of a strange, occasionally rocking and sometimes discordant season for Sunderland. Here, then, are the songs – some real, some imagined, that defined it for him …
Scroll down to vote for your World Cup team (minus England and Brazil: see why at https://safc.blog/2014/05/brazil-2014-vote-the-second-team-of-your-choice/
Spurs was one of the games I planned to attend. Only tentatively originally, because Helen and Will (daughter and Spurs-supporting boyfriend) had a wedding to go to and they said I could borrow Will’s season ticket and bunk down at theirs, but it was all lined up until the game was moved to a Monday night and the plan was scuppered.
John McCormick, who – as many readers will know – lives in Liverpool, writes: Vince commented recently that The Sun now calls SAFC “Derland” after SAFC banned them from football-related briefings. The question I would ask is why is it doing this? It’s a stupid activity that does no one any good, least of all The Sun itself, and it is being done at just the wrong time …
This is the newspaper, and I use that term though others might not, that behaved disgracefully towards Liverpool supporters, indeed the whole city, 25 years ago. On the day Sunderland played West Ham the Hillsborough inquests reopened and, I’m sure, provided many Liverpudlians with a reminder of just how wrong The Sun got it.
You may remember the first chart below. I posted it at the the mid-point of this season. It uses the improvement or deterioration of last season’s best and worst post-Christmas performers in the bottom half of the table, (i.e. Reading and Stoke) to predict the points that this season’s bottom teams will end up with if they perform at the same levels as those clubs. There’s also a middle range figure, generated from the average change in performance of all the bottom teams.
John McCormick is among Kevin Ball’s admirers. But, as Gus Poyet sets about the mammoth task of saving Sunderland AFC from relegation and Ellis Short ponders the club structure from top to bottom, he argues that the time may have come for Bally to move on. Not everyone will agree …
Rather than rattle on about Gus Poyet, about whom I know nothing, I thought I’d rattle on about managerial changes in general. My starting point was Neil Carter’s 2006 book “The football manager, A history” which I used in my last post. You might remember me writing that Carter reckoned the average managerial tenure at the start of the Premiership was 1.5 years. There was room for argument as Dr. Sue Bridgewater put it at about 2.5 years in a recent report she wrote for the League Managers’ Association but as she also documented a declining trend, so much so that managers now last about 1.4 years, I don’t think it matters.