A very worrying statistic for Newcastle United…
Posted on December 22nd, 2011 | 41 Comments |
Since our 2-1 defeat of Everton, we have picked up a mere two points in our last six games, 0.39 points per game. Despite our excellent start to the season which at one stage saw us in third place, if this form were to continue, we would only gain an extra 6.93 points between now and the end of the season, which would leave us with a total of only 33.93 points (OK 34 points) on the day of the last judgement in May after our final game with Everton. Dear reader, I probably don’t need to tell you that this was the same points total which saw us relegated at the end of the 2008/9 season, and that we would almost cartianly be staring relegation in the face once more if that were to happen again.
Of course, it is true that our recent bad run of form started with a terrible trio of fixtures against moneybags Man City, the current champions from the other side of Manchester, as well as moneybags Chelsea. However we also failed in a similar but less expected fashion against three other teams where we might have been expected to make up the ground lost in those previous three games, ie the Premiership minnows of Norwich City and Swansea City, and also the yo-yos of West Bromwich Albion most recently. Though we face another supposedly “easy” game against struggling Bolton next, we will then have two more clashes with big guns in the form of the leviathan of Liverpool, and then the mighty Manchester United once again.
This kind of thing has happened before, one recent example being Hull City in the season we were relegated (2008/9). In the last few days of October 2008, they were third in the Premiership after beating the likes of Arsenal an Tottenham, and of course, ourselves when the Keegangate imbroglio was at it’s height. There were even calls for Hull’s manager of the time, the orange hued Phil Brown, to be our next England manager. It then started to go decidedly pear shaped from that point. The “Tigers” of Hull were defeated 3-0 by Chelsea, as we were recently after our November downturn started, and after that, they only won two more Premiership games that season. They narrowly avoided relegation with only 36 points by the time the end of the season came. If we had managed to beat Aston Villa in our final game of that season, Hull would have been relegated, but at our expense they lived to fight another season, eventually making the drop back down to the Championship a year later. As I mentioned there have been other Premiership examples, perhaps a little less extreme such as Blackpool last season, who looked a good bet in the top ten in the earlier parts of the season, then eventually succumbing to relegation, and Leicester City in the 2000/1 season. They topped the League in October, eventually finishing in 13th. They were then relegated in last place the following season and so on…
I am not saying in a million years that Newcastle United will be relegated at the end of this season, or even that there is a very good chance of it, however some fans, and possibly even some owners have undeniably read far too much into a few good results at the beginning of a season. I am saying this partly because the January transfer window now looms large and some poor decisionmaking during this period could turn a mini drama into another large crisis for the Toon, especially with our current owner.
Though our current manager, Alan Pardew, is a man of roughly similar managerial abilties to Phil Brown in the Hull City example I cited above, our current squad should still be stronger than the one Brown had at his disposal. Basically it’s a mid table squad at the moment and if we finish in or around the European places, Pardew will have done a good job overall, and if we finish in or around the relegation zone, the opposite. However this can soon change in the course of a transfer window, especially with an owner who who is so unwilling to pay the going rate for players both in terms of transfer fees and wages, and also sets so much store by the resale value and profitabilty of both his current players and his transfer targets. It also goes without saying of course that some of our relatively poorly paid players will be targeted with far better offers by more ambitious clubs, not just the usual suspects at the top of the division, but also other more ambitious clubs such as QPR, Sunderland, Stoke et al, who are willing to offer far more generous contracts to players than we are currently.
So Ashley’s unwillingness to bid at the going rate for potential new players, combined with his unwillingness to offer existing players what they could get elsewhere when negotiating contract extensions can be a dangerous game. It can also have a domino effect, leading players who were previously happy to seek more security elsewhere when they see the contantly revolving door of players coming in and out of the club in order to secure the maximum financial advantage in the short term, rather than having the ambition to build a settled successful team which could secure a financial advantage in the long term.
Hopefully we will not see too many departures in the January transfer window, and hopefully we will see some new players too. However, the club should not be blinded by it’s good early season form, which is now seemingly a thing of the past. It should also seek to build a settled squad, and also, as recent injuries have proved, a squad of greater depth in some areas than the one we have currently.
NUFCBlog Author: workyticket
workyticket has written 1091 articles on this blog.
well said mate,brilliant article