Tottenham Hotspur, Title Contenders?

So far so good for Tottenham this year, after the highs of last year’s Champions League were followed by the lows of failure to qualify it looked like our progress of late may have run aground, this season however has seen Tottenham seriously mentioned as a title contender for the first time since I can remember (I Started to support them in 1991) and it is definitely the first time I can remember them being level with points with Man Utd the business side of Christmas.

Unfortunately I have still been a spurs team throughout the 90’s and the 00’s so I am still slightly reluctant to believe that it isn’t all going to go wrong (Just too many false dawns.) this may all change however in the next six weeks as we enter our “Hell” period:

22nd January Man City (A)
31st January Wigan (H)
6th February Liverpool (A)
11th February Newcastle (H)
26th February Arsenal (A)
3rd March Man Utd (H)

Yes in 6 weeks will meet 5 of the top seven including trips to the City of Manchester, Anfield and the Emirates, this next 6 weeks should tell us if we are title challengers or just a footnote on a future sky sports premier league years programme. If we can arrive at the evening of the 3rd March in the top four then I will feel quite confidant of a top 4 finish (as I think we have a very easy run in) If we can actually win 3 or 4 of those encounters then I see no reason why we should not be considered title contenders. Personally I will happy with a draw against Manchester City and Arsenal. Think we should be able to beat Man Utd and Newcastle at the lane and would hope we can get a result from Anfield, but no matter how good we have been this year part of me will still be suspecting that we may lose all of them and be faced at the start of March with a tough road to re-qualify for the Europa League, either way these next few weeks will decide our season.

Another Season Comes to an End

Well the Premiership is over for another year, Tottenham could not match last season by qualifying for the Champions League but their fifth place is only the 22nd time the club have finished in the top 5 in their history and the fourth since I started to support them so I am happy. It was always going to be a tough ask as although we have several players with Champions League experience they had never played at that level as a team, in the end I think we were simply suffering from a few injuries at the wrong points and in the end the team just ran out of steam. (Not to mention the Ref in the Chelsea game who cost us three points.)

Question is can Tottenham get back in the top four next season? I hope so but I think if it is to happen it will need to be at the expense of Arsenal and probably with a harder challenge from Liverpool. Obviously it would be slightly pointless to try and work out the strengths of the teams next year before we see the effect of the transfer window but I would fully expect the champions to come from one of Man Utd, Man City and Chelsea - And Chelsea are my least favoured team - This will leave Tottenham, Arsenal and Liverpool to fight over the final Champions League space and I think a lot of this will come down to how the teams strengthen and the effect that Arsenal and Tottenham competing in Europe will have.

Updated Premier League Predictions

I have re-evaluated the stats on my league table prediction programme (Replaced the predicted values with the real values and increased the Co-Eff of the new values by .2 to weight reality over predictions)

There have been big changes at the top since last time, Mainly for a Tottenham point of view that Chelsea will swap places with Man City but that Tottenham will still qualify for the Champions League – perhaps more remarkable however is that Arsenal will win the League overtaking Man Utd on the 30^th April after victory at the Emirates stadium and not looking back from there.

Sunderland still sit in a highly likely Europa League place just needing either Arsenal to win the League Cup Final against Birmingham or Arsenal/Man Utd to play Man City in the FA Cup final and they will feature in the Europa League for the first time.

Liverpool's recent improvement in form is not enough to lift them above Sunderland, so if things go the way I predict then Liverpool will miss out on European Football next season unless both of the above come true.

The other big changes are at the bottom where Fulham are no longer predicted in the drop zone and West Ham end up getting relegated along with Blackpool and Wigan.

So here's the latest table

I must again preface this with the acknowledgement that I know that this is all rubbish and will still quite likely bear no resemblance to the final league position – especially as I have so far managed just 46% of correct results.

Can I predict the rest of the Premier League Season?

Of cause I can't, however I have been messing around over the Christmas break and I have come up with a Prediction model for the premier league. As I like to put my neck on the line I am going to publish my prediction of the final league table now.

So I am showing that Manchester United will win the Premier League with Arsenal Second, Man City Third and Spurs retaining forth place at the expense of Chelsea. Other points of note are that LFC finish 9th and so do not qualify for European Football and West Ham avoid relegation at the expense of London Rivals Fulham in the last week of the season.

So how did I come up with these predictions? Basically I built three values based on Home/Away and Combined performance.

I then applied a sliding prioritising to these values based on the time between the game and the current date so that the previous games ratio was 1, the game before applied at 0.9 down to all games over ten weeks ago based at 0.1 these then combined to give a rating for the home and away teams, Then combining the Home/Away score with .25 score from the total combined score I applied these to the results of the last match between the two teams to come to the predictive final score.

So for example tonight’s game against Stoke I have Man Utd with a score of 0.95 and Stoke with an Away score of 0.39 these values are applied to the reverse fixture a 1-2 victory for Man Utd and so the model predicts a 2-0 win for Man Utd.

Now before I head down to William Hill to make my fortune I should say that the model has a predictive accuracy of 53% (On Correct results rather than direct scores) which may sound like a wide margin of error (And it is) but it is considerably better than the first instance of the model which ran at 14% accuracy.

The main limitations of the model are that it will always produce a very low amount of draws preferring to predict direct Home and Away wins (Mostly Home) and the scores predicted are usually low as it can not correctly predict when a team will collapse to a 6-0 defeat.

Finally due to the ratings that I calculate the rating will evolve and change with each week so even after one game the prediction model will adjust all future games and therefore the weekly predictions I am planning to publish (If I get the time and remember) will be highly unlikely to reflect the current predictions as this is based on if the teams play the rest of the season in their current form. For example when I built the model last week it predicted Arsenal Third, Chelsea Forth but now predicts Tottenham Fourth and Chelsea fifth based on the change in Chelsea’s rating after the Aston Villa game.

So in short all of this means basically that there is no point me listing the league table as it has come from the model but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I will however be publishing my predictions each week so that you can see how I am doing over all, just the results though as the scores are seldom actually correct.

So here goes for this weeks

Blackpool V Birmingham – Blackpool Win
Fulham V West Brom – Fulham Win
Man Utd V Stoke City – Man Utd Win
Everton V Tottenham Hotspur – Tottenham Win
Arsenal V Man City – Draw
Aston Villa V Sunderland – Aston Villa Win
Newcastle V West Ham – Newcastle Win
Wolves V Chelsea – Draw
Blackburn V Liverpool – Blackburn Win
Bolton V Wigan – Bolton Win

Champions league draw, again

Well I was told that Spurs would never make it to the champions league, then I was told that we would be lucky to qualify, next came the certain fact that we would not qualify from our "group of death."
You can imagine how happy I am then to be waiting for the draw for the knock out stage of the competition, there are not a lot of easy teams left at this stage so anyone we get will of cause be tough, our opponents will be out of the second placed teams - not including Arsenal or Inter Milan - so it will be out of: Roma, AC Milan, Lyon, Copenhagen or Marseille. Of these I guess I would like Copenhagen and dislike AC Milan - although our last visit to Milan was definitely an interesting event.
I am very glad we finished top of our group however as things look a lot worse for Arsenal who will be travelling to Germany or Spain to face one of: Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich or FC Schalke. So I guess they will be hoping for Schalke but they are by no means an easy team, and I do not really understand Arsene Wenger's assertion that they don't fear Barcelona as they were beaten so badly last year, but I guess that's his job.

Anyway onto the draw:

We got AC Milan in what I am sure is the game of the round, at least no one can say we did it the easy way, the strategy should be to try and keep 11 men on the pitch there and then destroy them at home, it has worked so far.
Other games
Roma vs Shakhtar
Valencia vs Schalke
Inter vs Munich (so arsenal are going to Spain.)
Man Utd vs Marseille
Barcelona vs Arsenal - repeat of last year
Chelsea vs Copenhagen
Real Madrid vs Lyon
So not a great draw for spurs, but at least it is worse for Arsenal.

Champions League Draw Round 1

With one day down in the Champions League it has been a very mixed bag for British Clubs,

Arsenal and Chelsea both won comfortably, Arsenal hammering Braga by 6 goals to 0(Which is becoming quite a common scoreline this season.) and Chelsea beating Zilina 4-1. To be honest the Chelsea result is probably the best as although the Slovakian champions are hardly Champions League contenders it is a difficult away match out of the way.

Tuesday night there were draws for Tottenham and Man Utd vs Rangers, if I had been asked before the kick off I would have happily taken an away draw for our first game but after powering to 2-0 after 20 minutes I felt a little disappointed by the final 2-2 result, it isn't a complete disaster however as Inter Milan also drew with FC Twente 2-2 so the group is still together but we have one less away game. Man Utd were probably the biggest British Losers of the round with Rangers getting a great 0-0 result against them, this 0-0 at old trafford is definitely a point won for Rangers and 2 dropped for United as the top seeds really shouldn't be dropping points at home, although I still feel that come the end of the group stage you will find United going through and Rangers will still probably struggle to join them.

New Premier League Rules

With the new season just a few weeks away the talk is all about transfers and The new Premier League squad rules, basically each team has a squad of 25 players with at least 8 being home grown (this means a player must be at a club registered with the English or Welsh FA by their 18th birthday) on top of these 25 the clubs can have an unlimited amount of under 21's,

I am not sure what kind of effect this will have, Spurs should be ok though as we have Huddlestone, King, Dawson, Bale, Lennon, Defoe, Crouch, Bentley, Jenas and O'Hara who are all home grown, and that is just off the top of my head, but Arsenal may need to dip into the market over the next month.