Some of you may recall a thread I started a few months back about Southampton being flat track bullies and basically pointing out how their great run had been schewed by facing only 6 top half teams in their 25 match unbeaten run (they drew 4 of those 6 matches against the better opposition). I also pointed out that Ipswich's bad run had seen them play a lot of matches against the better sides during that run. So consulting my spreadsheet today I noticed some very interesting results.
Our points per game against top half teams is 2.05. This is comfortably better than Leicester (1.77), Ipswich (1.64) and the flat track bullies Southampton (1.38).
The trouble for us this season would appear to not be our ability to perform in the big matches but against the lesser lights.
Our points per game against the bottom half teams is amazingly worse than what we got against the top half teams - just 1.96, compared to the 2.05 points we achieved against top half teams. Contrast that to the other 'big 4' sides and Leicester smashed the bottom half teams, averaging 2.52 points per games, Ipswich did similar 2.48 per game and Southampton managed 2.29.
Where we lost out this season was our failings against teams that presumably set their stall out to take a point (with the hope they could frustrate us and then nick all 3). Our recent run of poor form followed the pattern as we took 6 points from 3 matches against top half teams but struggled with taking just 2 points from 4 matches against bottom half sides.
Given the above the hope would be that we are more suited to doing well in the play-offs than the other teams.
