Where will Newcastle United finish this season?
Posted on January 19th, 2011 | 73 Comments |
Alan Pardew recently claimed that he wanted to eventually threaten the top ten, but I’m not too sure we’ll be all that far away from it this season.
We would surely have to suffer an almighty collapse of form or an unprecedented number of injuries (even for Newcastle) to consider a 17th place finish anything but disappointing.
I thought I’d take a look at the games we have left and try to estimate how many points we’ll end up with. Don’t trust my estimates though. I once ‘estimated’ that a Christmas tree I saw at a garden centre would fit in my house. It did, but only after I chopped 4ft off the top and 2ft off the diameter. It was more of a Christmas bush by the time I finished.
Nevertheless, I’ll have a crack. We have 16 games left to play – 8 at home and 8 away – and the following are my guesstimates as to how those games will go on a month by month basis:
January
Spurs (H) … draw
1 point from 3 for the remainder of the month.
February
Fulham (A) … draw
Arsenal (H) … lose
Blackburn (A) … lose
Birmingham (A) … win
Bolton (H) … win
7 points from 15 for the month.
March
Everton (H) … draw
Stoke (A) … lose
1 point from 6 for the month.
April
Wolves (H) … win
Villa (A) … win
Man U (H) … lose
Blackpool (A) … draw
Liverpool (A) … lose
7 points from 15 for the month.
May
Birmingham (H) … win
Chelsea (A) … lose
West Brom (H) … win
6 points from 9 for the month.
Total: 22 points from 48, which will give us 51 points and thus a typical finishing position (going by previous Premier League points v position estimates) of 8th – 11th.
Purely a guess of course and I think we stand a greater chance of taking more points than that than we do of taking less because I’ve erred on the pessimistic side.
So what do you think? Any advance on 51 points?
home form is the key of course if can get maximum from those games and have a good away form then we should be good