I’ve been trying to assess how well we’ve done (or not) at this stage of the season and form came into the equation.
Now, after the dire form that we’d shown during Di Matteo’s reign, I expected our current form to have improved massively.
It makes sense that given we’ve climbed from nineteenth to ninth in the actual league, that our recent form would put us much higher to balance things out, doesn’t it?
Well, our form has of course improved, but not to the extent I expected.
If you take a look at this excellent site, http://www.footballwebpages.co.uk/astonvilla/form/ten, you’ll see that we are in ninth position over the last ten games, exactly the same as our actual league position.
Which surprised me really.
If you continue to look at the more recent current form of 8,6 and 4 weeks, our standing in the table has actually got progressively worse and we’re twelfth in the table.
So what does that tell us?
Well, at first glance, it tells me that we need to do better if we’re going to move up the table as we all want.
Fortunately, things are not quite as bad as they first seem, as they are slightly skewed by having played Leeds twice recently.
And to show why I’m not too downbeat, take a look at this, which demonstrates things perfectly;
http://www.footballwebpages.co.uk/astonvilla/progress
From our nadir, when RDM left and Bruce took over (games 11-12) the graphic shows a very nice progression indeed and seems to demonstrate that a play-off place is easily within our grasp.
Then factor in that you might say we’ve had our poor part of the season, where some teams above us haven’t and things look even better.
We do need to keep improving though and again it shows how it’s important that we get at least some better players in to keep the momentum going.
As an aside, look at Derby’s form over the last 10 games!
Although I’d expect them to fade at the back-end of the season, as they usually do.
Not exactly a good advert for Nigel Pearson (who many of us, me included, wanted) really, is it?
