This season’s relegation poll went live at about 8.30 on Wednesday morning. By 2.30 some eighteen hundred votes had been cast. Hull received about a third of them and remained clear favourites. Burnley stayed in second place, although the gap had widened, and we had moved up to third. The other five clubs were well behind:
relegation
Hull, Burnley, Bournemouth, Middlesbrough, Watford, Sunderland, West Brom or Crystal Palace. Choose your three
It was June 12th when I first put up this season’s relegation poll and July 1st, when the transfer window opened, that I gave you the preliminary results.
Every Premiership club received some votes. Man Utd got thirteen. Spurs and Arsenal (last relegated in the year the Royal Flying Corps established its first airfield) both got ten. Man City, Liverpool and Chelsea received six each, as did Stoke. West Ham were the second best fancied team, with four votes, while Everton received only two votes and are thus deemed most likely to stay in the top division (something they have managed every year since the end of rationing) but not entirely safe.
Given such wishful thinking I had to do some winnowing so I chose 100 votes as the cut-off, which gave me a reasonable number of 8 clubs to watch, and you can see the results in the title above.
The people have spoken: Hull, Burnley and Bournemouth to leave the union
Would you believe that some people, somewhere, think Man Utd will be relegated? And that others say the axe will fall on Spurs, Chelsea, or Man City. Some even say Arsenal will go down.
That’s democracy for you, so please, please, no histrionics, vitriol or gratuitous insults. There have been enough of them these past few weeks and it’s time for civilised behaviour between gentlefolk, like we always get when discussing football.
Relegation poll: Middlesbrough, Hull or Sunderland? Arsenal and Manchester Utd? Vote now
I’m getting a bit tired of the title (and Monsieur Salut should apologise to any reader lured here by thoughts it was a poll on religion; the word inexplicably replaced relegation in the headline when published and still appeared some time later at the newsnow.co.uk site) .
But just because we have some decent players, led by one of the Premier League’s most experienced managers and backed by a tremendous crowd, we can’t assume we’re safe.
Our record is not good. We’ve been one of the survivors for too many seasons and we can’t take anything for granted. Even now there will be some fans somewhere rubbing their hands as they look at the fixtures and thinking ‘Sunderland, that’s an easy three points’.
Relegation watch revisited (2): It was the draws wot done it
number crunching
The season before last we won only 7 games and we stayed up. We even finished above Aston Villa, who won 10, as well as QPR and Hull City, whose 8 wins each could not stave off relegation. The other relegated team, Burnley, had 7 wins, the same as us.
The difference between us and Burnley was that we achieved 17 draws, and lost only (only??) 14 games. They could manage only 12 draws, and their five fewer points meant they finished second bottom, three places below us.
And thinking about that got me started on the notion of win-loss ratios, which became the tool I used to track clubs in last season’s relegation watch.
Relegation watch revisted (1): admit it, we fans know nowt about football*
having a rest between graphs
Regular visitors will know I’ve been in the habit of looking at the relegation spots for the last couple of years. I haven’t wanted to, it’s just that I’m not sure where the top half of the table is.
So, about a year ago, instead of making my own predictions, I asked readers which clubs were going down, with the aim of tracking these clubs as the season progressed.
The poll ran from June until the end of the transfer season. Initially it was more or less confined to SAFC fans then others came on board, and some of them weren’t complimentary about us.
SA’s Everton essay: fantastic (with things to sing when you’re winnin’)
John McCormick writes: Petula’s singing quietly in the background as I finish my beer. I’ll shortly be going to bed, where I’ll hum “I believe” until, at midnight, Radio 4 lets the sound of Big Ben ring out with: Jer-main-De-foe, Jou-nas-Ka-boul; Kha-zri-Ko-ne, Ca-at-er-mole.
Tomorrow, I’ll wake up to Oklahoma’s “Oh what a beautiful morning”, which will be followed by Louis Armstrong and “it’s a wonderful world” but, really, I’ll be waiting for Stevie Wonder and “Overjoyed”, which will accompany Pete Sixsmith’s report.
But that’s tomorrow. Before then, after Petula finishes and before Big Ben begins, we have “The Letter”:
Wrinkly Pete’s points projection sends Newcastle and Norwich down. Now you vote
Read Peter Lynn‘s assessment of the relegation run-in and why he believes it favours Sunderland. Check the remaining fixtures – see footnote – for yourselves and vote. Since Monsieur Salut and his Norwich and Newcastle bloggers at ESPN FC all put their teams to finish 17th, we can hardly be surprised if the poll results reflect similar partisan hopes. But have a go all the same – some people may even be objective …
[polldaddy poll=9389387]
Norwich v Sunderland: Norfolk dumplings, Wearside bruisers and stings in the tail
The nerves are beginning to show. Monsieur Salut accepts at ESPN that it’s not Big Sam’s mustn’t-lose, but a clear must-win match. History offers little solace. The task falls to Sunderland AFC, in front of their 15th sell-out away crowd in a wretched season, to raise their games and flatten the Norfolk Dumplings, so known because the unflattened version is a traditional local delicacy (Delia probably does them quite well).
Pete Sixsmith anticipates Saturday’s trip and remembers others from the past, including the 2-2 draw also attended by M Salut and also occurring towards the end of a (vain) fight against relegation …
Staying up made easy: emulate Arsenal and Liverpool against Leicester, beat Norwich
All graphics courtesy of Jake
Pete Sixsmith says we will go down unless we win four games. Big Sam sets the same target. With only seven left, and looking at who we face in them, it takes a serious half-glass full believer to have much faith in that happening.
“Can we halt the Leicester juggernaut and drive the Foxes into a hole?” Sixer asked at the start of a splendid trawl through the nicknames of those opponents. ” Having done that, can we survive the plastic clappers at Carrow Road and knock the Canaries off their perch? Can we silence the Gunners, break the Potters and consign the Pensioners to their barracks. Will we come unstuck against the Toffees before drawing the sting from the Hornets?”
It looks beyond us. But it can be done, subject to rather a lot of Ifs.