One afternoon last week I received a viral email from a particularly diligent and hard working colleague at work.  It turned out that on this occasion, rather than rating a number of women from a large accountancy firm, I was to be challenged on my football trivia knowledge.

Although you may not believe me, as it turned out that neither Nick Barmby nor Christian Ziege were legitimate answers.

I was tasked with drumming up the Premier League appearance record holder for each letter of the alphabet, by surname.

I am sure many of you reading this that also work in an office environment will have received the same email.  Forget wikileaks, the speed with which a sports trivia email can whizz around the entire developed world shows the true power of t’interwebs.

After managing to come up with about 20 of the 26 answers, I was beginning to grind to a halt.  And due to time restrictions, rather than setting up a alphabet/position matrix, I decided to hit the FA’s website and do a spot of research (AKA cheating).

Read More→

Evening peoples.

Firstly, apologies for the data used in this piece being one week out of date.  It doesn’t really impact its effectiveness.

In fact, hell, use it as an opportunity to fire up the old grey matter and see if you can remember the results for the corresponding fixtures from 2009-10 of those played this weekend past.

As I permanently harp on about here at BOTW, everything in the world is relative.

This doesn’t just apply to football, betting or football betting.

Almost everything in life is relative.  The value of your house, the cost of the latest TV, the state of the Irish economy, the quality of Wagner’s singing ability.  They are all only quantified by making a judgement based on a comparison to similar or related things.

So, when we are looking at a football team’s results part way through a season, one interesting thing rarely considered is how the fixture list is unwinding.  As inherently, every team has played a different set of games.

There is no comparison that can be made that is flawless.  But one thing I always like to do is track a teams progress compared to their results from the corresponding fixtures last year.

Now, obviously three of the Premier League teams are obviously different from last season. If you are confused, this should help.

Rather than simply exclude these three teams altogether, and the fixtures involving the corresponding teams from last year, for the sake of the analysis I have simply substituted teams 18-20 from last season (namely Burnley, Hull and Portsmouth) for the newly promoted sides (Newcastle, West Brom and Blackpool).

Although far from perfect, given that “those in the know” predicted that both Blackpool and West Brom would sink like stones this year, their respective performances levels shouldn’t be too dramatically different in most circumstances…

So, with over a third of the season now gone, let’s see how everyone is getting on versus last season…

Read More→