Arsenal will be joint top of the league by Christmas: the Untold predictions

 

 

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By Tony Attwood

We have been looking at the current football season, off and on, through the notion that there are seven “big” clubs in the league, each of whom might at the start of the season have fancied their chances of ending up in a Champions League spot.

We have also been considering the fact that the fixture list is certainly not even, some clubs having had a much tougher time of it than others, thus making the fixture list until Xmas again, rather uneven..

Which is something that has already gone out of the window since Aston Villa have now joined the elite ensemble being in fifth place at the moment, while Chelsea are resolutely still in tenth.

More than that, each of these teams might well fancy their chances in games against any of the other members of the elite group in the way that much of the rest of the league would not.

That’s not to say that the top teams always win – of course not – but they generally pose an extra threat to each other, and mostly beat the lesser teams.  Except Chelsea, who remain the oddballs in the whole thing what with beating Tottenham and holding Manchester City.

So we thought we might have a bit of fun and make a prediction of how the season will rearrange itself in the next six games.  And to make it very simple (for us anyway) we reduced our predictions to the current top seven clubs, so we include Aston Villa, and forget Chelsea.

Of course, it won’t happen as we say, but then no one else’s predictions come right either, and it may well not be too far from the truth.  But what we have done is taken into account how often members of our elite seven play each other in coming games, and how they are doing for cards (which can of course start disrupting the team with suspensions, given the numbers being issued.)

Indeed those yellow and red numbers are

• Tottenham Hotspur: 39 yellows, 3 reds
• Newcastle United: 33 yellows, 0 reds
• Aston Villa: 29 yellows, 0 reds
• Manchester United 26 yellows 0 reds
• Manchester City: 22 yellows, 2 reds
• Liverpool: 20 yellows, 4 reds
• Arsenal: 16 yellows, 2 reds.

As you can see Newcastle and Tottenham are running at double Arsenal’s rate of yellow cards, and that will start disrupting them very soon.

Following our in-house discussions an ambulance has been called to take away the injured and because our house rules forbid hitting very old men, I’ve got the job of summarising the results.   Matches between two members of the big seven are in bold.

Manchester City: Three wins, two draws, one defeat.  11 points

• Liverpool (H)
• Tottenham (H)
• Aston Villa (A)
• Luton (A)
• Crystal Palace (H)
• Everton (A)

Liverpool: Four wins, one draw, one defeat.  13 points 

• Manchester City (A)
• Fulham (H)
• Sheffield United (A)
• Crystal Palace (A)
• Manchester United (H)
• Arsenal (H)

‌‌ Arsenal: four wins, one draw, one defeat.  13 points 

• Brentford (A)
• Wolverhampton Wanderers (H)
• Luton Town(A)
• Aston Villa (A)
• Brighton and Hove Albion (H)
• Liverpool (A)

Tottenham Hotspur: 3 wins, 1 draw, 2 defeats.  10 points

• Aston Villa (H)
• Manchester City (A)
• West Ham United (H)
• Newcastle United (H)
• Nottingham Forest (A)
• Everton (H)

Aston Villa: 3 wins, 1 draw, 2 defeats.  10 points

• Tottenham Hotspur (A)
• Bournemouth (A)
• Manchester City (H)
• Arsenal (H)
• Brentford (A)
• Sheffield United (H)

Manchester United: 3 wins, 3 defeats. 9 points

• Everton (A)
• Newcastle United (A)
• Chelsea (H)
• Bournemouth (H)
• Liverpool A)
• West Ham (A)

Newcastle United.  3 wins, 1 draw, 2 defeats.  10 points 

• Chelsea (H)
• Manchester United (H)
• Everton (A)
• Tottenham Hotspur (A)
• Fulham (H)
• Luton Town (A)

And so the table round about Christmas will, we think, look like this (according to our predictions)

 

 

We may however have got this wrong.