Colin Speller attempts to bring some science to the art of speculating about QPR’s diminishing chances of Premier League survival.
We are at the end of the first week of Harry Redknapp’s reign and, sad to say, an air of frustration and perhaps resignation hangs over QPR. Whilst things at Sunderland and against Villa were undoubtedly better, in the end the continued inability of the R’s to achieve any consistent cohesion in the last third of the field cost them four points that were very much there for the taking. Adrift at the foot of the table and seven points from safety, it is difficult not to conclude that all is lost and that we are set for a long hard winter as QPR cement their place in the Championship for next season and potentially in Premier League history for all the wrong reasons.
Sport is full of people presenting the blindingly obvious as some sort of revelation and I remember thinking ‘here we go again’ when listening to Mike Atherton, erstwhile England cricket captain, extolling the virtues of setting milestones within a cricket innings. He was talking about the one-day form of the game at the time but did go on to say that he had always believed it to be vitally important in Test cricket, especially when trying to chase a massive score to win or save a match, and he cited use of such targets in his monumental 185 not out in 643 minutes to salvage a draw in a game against South Africa. His view was that it was vital to have a clear idea of target scores at key stages – lunch, tea, close of play, etc – to include runs and wickets. Without such targets, teams and individual batsmen could lose the plot, with a single wicket prompting panic and a fatal collapse of the innings.
In the marathon innings that is a football season it is indeed very easy to lose the plot. It’s usually October or maybe November when somebody on a QPR message board announces grimly that if we don’t win the next game we are definitely going to get relegated/fail to win promotion (delete as applicable). Whilst this opinion may have some foundation in both history and probability, it’s certainly not and never was a fact that a game lost at this time of the year can be definitively stated to be the moment the key objective was lost. Nevertheless, in a season-long relegation battle most fans will tend to ascribe too great a value to an individual win and too great a sense of disaster to a defeat or even a draw. This roller-coaster sensation is bad for the nerves but, worse still, one or two poor results can build unacceptable pressure on players and supporters to the detriment of the team and its performance.
The other benchmark used by many fans at this time of the year is the performance of rival teams; ‘Oh no, Villa have won and are now N points clear of us’ is the sort of lament you hear. Actually, at this stage it doesn’t really matter – QPR need to chart a way to achieve a target number of points, irrespective of what other teams are doing this week and next. Of course, the standard of the teams in the league will eventually set the cut-off for relegation and it would be wise at this stage to assume that we will need more than the 37 points we achieved last year, but generally at this time of year we expend a disproportionate amount of emotional energy on the results of other teams.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy cautions against the need for a sense of proportion for reasons set out in the sub-section on the Total Perspective Vortex here. But, it also introduces us to the concept of ‘rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty’ and it is to provide boundaries of this type to our wildly fluctuating mood in the coming weeks that I have attempted to combine the wisdom of Mike Atherton and Douglas Adams to bring some science and basic numbers to bear on the challenge of QPR’s Premier League survival. It will probably do little to stop me feeling massively depressed if we lose at Wigan , or completely over-the-top elated if we win, but it may just help us all chart a path to salvation and keep us from losing the plot too soon and too fast if some results don’t always go our way.
All I’ve done in the following table is to set out the games for the rest of the season and give my estimate of a possible points yield from each game that would get us from six points now to 42 points at the completion of the penultimate game of the season. You can argue with the logic of each game, or shudder at the thought that we need to win games away from home, or indeed win games at all. If you are geeky enough to want to play with the information yourself, e-mail me me and I will send you the original spreadsheet and you can enter your own predictions and see if they work.
Apart from showing that there is a plausible path to 42 points the cumulative target allows better or worse than expected results to be put into perspective. For example, I am predicting that we will have 15 points at the end of December and 17 at the end of January. It doesn’t matter if my predictions for the individual games in those months turn out to be right or wrong, if we are at 17 points by the end of January we can be considered to be ‘on track’, more than that and we are ahead of the pace, less than that and we need a new set of targets for the remaining months to reach the objective.
The table also includes a comparison to the results from the equivalent games last year, with me having made random pairings of the promoted teams to the relegated teams for the purposes of the comparison. That shows that we need 11 more points from the coming games than we achieved from the equivalent games last year if we are to reach my target of 42 points, but only six more points if 37 points once again proves to be enough (which I doubt it will to be honest).
Of course, the downside of this is that, very much like a cricket innings, it will allow us to see defeat quite some time before it arrives. But, they say it’s the hope that kills you, so perhaps it will be useful to be able to see when all hope should actually be abandoned rather than continue with false optimism.
Anyway, I hope this gives some reassurance that the task is achievable, brings some light to the debate about our chances and maybe, just maybe, helps keep everyone’s blood pressure down a little in the coming weeks.
| The Road to 42 Points | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Match | Last Year | Prediction | Cumulative |
| Wigan A | 0 | 1 | 7 |
| Fulham H | 0 | 3 | 10 |
| Newcastle A | 0 | 1 | 11 |
| West Brom H | 1 | 3 | 14 |
| Liverpool H | 3 | 1 | 15 |
| Chelsea A* | 0 | 0 | 15 |
| Spurs H* | 3 | 1 | 16 |
| West Ham A* ( Blackburn ) | 0 | 1 | 17 |
| Man City H* | 0 | 0 | 17 |
| Norwich H | 0 | 3 | 20 |
| Swansea A | 1 | 1 | 21 |
| Man Utd H | 0 | 0 | 21 |
| Southampton A (Wolves) | 3 | 3 | 24 |
| Sunderland H | 0 | 3 | 27 |
| Villa A | 1 | 1 | 28 |
| Fulham A | 0 | 1 | 29 |
| Wigan H | 3 | 3 | 32 |
| Everton A | 3 | 0 | 32 |
| Stoke H | 3 | 3 | 35 |
| Reading A ( Bolton ) | 0 | 3 | 38 |
| Arsenal H | 3 | 1 | 39 |
| Newcastle H | 1 | 3 | 42 |
| Liverpool A | 0 | 0 | 42 |
| Total | 31 | 42 | 42 |
* Transfer window open, squad restrictions lifted
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Pictures – Action Images