By common consensus, amongst Newcastle fans anyway, Steve Bruce has/had enjoyed incredible luck this season.
Despite ultra-negative tactics and at the wrong end of pretty much every set of stats (possession, chances created, chances conceded, shots on target, shots needing to be saved, expected goals etc etc), somehow Newcastle United reached 25 points after 18 Premier League matches.
Lazy/twisted media were having a field day, Steve Bruce doing a brilliant job, why are Newcastle fans never happy…
Then as we (fans and any credible journalists) knew would happen, the luck would eventually run out.
Sure enough, Steve Bruce has presided over a desperate last nine Premier League match run. The results becoming as ugly as the football we were being served up, all but inevitable.
Only one win from nine, six points (only West Ham with less) from a possible 27, six goals scored (only Norwich with less), 17 goals conceded (only two clubs letting in more).
The Steve Bruce luck having finally well and truly ran out, or has it?
The Premier League form table over the past nine matches, then the current full Premier League table and some extra info/conclusions below:
Current PL table:
As you can see, despite that horrendous nine game run, Newcastle United are still seven points clear of relegation and have six clubs below them.
How can that be possible?
Well, if we take the bottom eight in the full PL table and look at what happened with them in that recent nine match run, all becomes apparent.
The other seven clubs (from Palace down) had nine games each, out of 63 opportunities to win matches they only won 13 between them:
3 Watford, Villa
2 Palace, Bournemouth
1 Brighton, West Ham, Norwich
It gets better…
Of those 13 wins, only two came in games against clubs who aren’t currently in the bottom eight – Villa beat Burnley and Watford beat Wolves.
Quite incredible, so out of 63 winning opportunities only two victories came against clubs not in the relegation struggle, in the top 12, not exactly against the elite!
The other 11 victories all came when the other seven clubs in the bottom eight were playing each other (or in Palace’s case, against Newcastle.
Bottom line, Steve Bruce is still riding a massive tidal wave of luck, the other clubs at the bottom only picking up significant numbers of points when playing each, when somebody at the bottom has to pick up points!
In these 11 remaining rounds of matches, I don’t think even Steve Bruce can continue this run of luck with other clubs’ results.
The strugglers will start picking up points from other clubs, as well as from fellow strugglers, but can Bruce’s Newcastle improve this increasingly downward trend of their own results?
The post Just when you thought Steve Bruce was running out of luck – Look at these incredible bottom 8 stats appeared first on NUFC The Mag.
