Never been in danger of going down.

[Rock The Boat 1,332]

[quote user="ricardo"][quote user="PurpleCanary"]

[quote user="Citizen Journalist Foghorn"]What a dumb post. Had we lost against WBA, our premiership status would have been out of our hands. Thankfully we put in a great attacking performance against a side already on the beach.[/quote]

 

 

 

Yes. Of course we were in real danger of going down. Ricardo has made the point  - quite rightly - that historically the bottom three in May will come out of those in (I think this is right) the bottom five in November/December. But there can alway be exceptions. And this season (which was not the case last year) we had two really poor teams falling off the bottom. That increased the chances of the fight to avoid finishing 18th being very congested, with some teams outside the mid-season bottom-five getting drawn in.Without reopening the debate as to WHY, that is what happened to us, and to some other teams, such as Fulham and Newcastle. That it will probably still be Wigan who go down (in line with ricardo''s thesis) doesn''t alter the fact that incrementally ourselves and those other "safe" teams got drawn into the struggle, whether by dint of bad luck, bad management or whatever.It is absurd to argue that we have not been in serious danger when we went into our penultimate game knowing that a draw might well see us relegated and a defeat would make it probable.

[/quote]Spot on analysis Purple. In the end any one of 7 or 8 teams have only survived by the very smallest of margins. The league has a very strange look this year with only WBA and Swansea comfortable in mid table. Apart from the bottom 2 everyone else is within 1 or 2 wins of 10th spot.If you look at last years final table you will see what I mean.[/quote]

Indeed. There have been so many teams involved, and with a couple of wins or a couple of losses resulting in major shifts in league position, I could never understand why so many posters were so full of anguish and tying themselves up in knots. Even since Christmas we were still harvesting points from draws enough to keep us out of the bottom five and the danger zone, and the wins against Reading and WBA in the latter part of the campaign were enough to ensure PL football next season. There were always so many teams with a worse set of results than us that required ALL of them to do better than us, for us to go down.

 

Now while we probably could expect some teams to pick up a few more points than us the probability of all the teams doing it (100 tails out of 100 tosses) was extremely low indeed.

One last point to make. Ricardo notes that 7 to 8 teams were within a few points of the relegation zone. Next season we can probably expect the same scenario, and the seasons after that, because there will be few financially ''poor'' teams in those mid-table positions (ourselves included). I just hope that next season we can all be a little calmer, a little less critical of the manager and show a little more solidarity in the face of adversity.