So here we are then, hurtling towards Christmas like a drunk man on a baking tray who won’t avoid that tree on the first day the local hill is snow covered.
In football Christmas is cliché city. Bored journalists plying us with statistics that if you’re bottom of the table on Christmas Day you may as well give up then because you’re doomed to be kicked out of the Premier League end of season party and made to go and play with the poor saps in the Championship.
And it is pretty much true. Since the inception of the Premier League (of course no football existed before then) only 3 of 24 teams performed the great escape. 2 of the instances have occurred in the last 3 seasons.
Sunderland climbed to a heady 14th place in 2013/14 and Leicester City (whatever happened to them) reached the same position a season later.
We of course found ourselves bottom at Christmas twice in 2002 and 2010. Both occasions ended with us falling through the Premier League trap door.
Now why I hear you murmuring, am I depressing everyone with such talk? Well below the many layers of claret and blue bias there is a niggly layer of realism.
With 5 league games to go until Christmas if we are not careful we could be plunged in to the relegation poop. We all know the next 3 games are going to be tough to get anything from. Road trips to Manchester United and Liverpool with a visit from Arsenal sandwiched in-between.
With our luck currently parked up in a layby several postcodes away I wouldn’t be out of turn suggesting the possibility we will come away with naff all from those games.
The teams around us could possibly gain ground on us with theoretically, opportunities to pick up some valuable points.
Swansea have home games against Palace (statistically the worst team in all 4 divisions in 2016) and fellow strugglers Sunderland.
Hull face West Brom, Middlesbrough and Palace. Sunderland have the aforementioned game with Swansea as well as a home game against poor travelling Leicester.
Now if you’re still reading, thanks for that and thanks for not lobbing rotten fruit, it is not just us that face this predicament.
If you look at the table, at the time of writing, there are 7 teams above us that are 3 points or less better off. One win can propel you up or plummet you down the table.
So yes, at face value 17th in the table is pretty bleak, and yes in the worst case scenario it could get bleaker.
But this season looks like it is going to wide open with no-one below the top 4 putting a real marker down. Manchester United in 6th place have only won 2 games more than us.
On the flip side of not doing well, in the coming weeks if we put a little run together we could be having a whole different conversation.
These 5 games up until Christmas are going to shape ours and a lot of other team’s seasons. I’m hoping ours goes in the right direction and I can get back to writing something a lot more jolly and fluffy.
COYI