With another international upon us, and having to wait another week for the next Premier League game, we thought we’d have a quick look at some numbers after our first 12 games of the season.
We’ve been tallying up numbers for each game this season and last season, as well predicting the outcome of each game to see how that compares with how we’re actually doing – we can then look to see how we compare with realistic expectations.
It’s fair to say that none of us are pleased with our start to the season, after all, Monk was rather foolish to brand the squad as the club’s ‘best ever’, and yet we’re worse off than we were last year – which you’ll see in the stats below.
As well as simply comparing points tally after 12 games compared to last season’s first 12 games, we’ll also compare like for like fixtures, just in case we had far more difficult matches earlier in the last campaign.
We predicted some of the matches before the season started, and added a few more recently to gauge against our start to the season.
In the end, we found that our predictions match our total points (13). We kindly and quite optimistically predicted 7 draws, 3 defeats and 2 wins – the two wins we thought would come against the Geordie sides in August. We predicted defeats against the bigger sides, Chelsea, Southampton and Arsenal. We’ve managed an extra win than we thought, but have lost more games as we expected us to draw against the likes of Watford, Stoke and Norwich – all games that we lost.
When predicting points for a ‘survival target’, which hopefully we won’t need to focus on after the New year, we automatically assumed we’d lose against the better sides home and away, beating the lesser sides – with the majority of points coming at home, rather than away. We expect the Swans to finish with a win/3 points more than the usual 40-point survival target – a total that hasn’t quite had to be achieved in recent seasons to survive the drop (17th place points in recent season – 35, 33, 36, 36)
It’s unfortunate to have to mention things like survival targets, but realistically we’re struggling and are one of the worst form sides in the League at present.
Will the Swans turn a corner soon, will it happen against Bournemouth on November 21st?
