A great bit of spin but all that glitters is not gold

Quite similarly to last year, it has been a crazy season so far. At this time last season, Chelsea had already lost 2 games out of 12 (but won 10) and Arsenal had lost 2 out of 11. They were both also occupying the top 2 positions, just like they are now with 3 defeats for each. Man Utd on the other hand had lost 3 but won 8 out of 12 while this year so far, we have won only 6 matches out of 13 and drawn 7. We are slightly worse off that at the same time last season (25 points against 24 points after 12 games).

Chelsea won the league despite 6 defeats last year whereas the year before that, Man Utd romped to the title with 4 defeats only (and 5 draws!). It is no secret that the league is getting tougher and the supposedly lesser teams are really giving it a go against the supposedly big boys. In that respect, all the top teams will be expected to lose a fair few games again this season, but the team who will win the league will have to notch up more wins that anyone else. This basically means that drawing games seems more damaging than actually losing one game. We all know that drawing 2 games is worse than losing one game and winning one. And even though we could pride (or fool?) ourselves with our unbeaten run this season, winning less than 50% of our games is not impressive at all!

I don’t know if the ‘unbeaten’ tag is actually making the team more nervous and less adventurous on the pitch (we only started to give a damn about the game on Saturday once we went 2-0 behind!), but I was actually secretly hoping for us to lose so that we can finally come to terms with the fact that, even though teams around us are faltering, we are not taking our chances of pushing for a 19th title and that the ‘unbeaten’ tag does not mean we have nothing to worry about, it actually means we are only trying to put a positive spin on a fairly poor start to the season.

A Manchester United penalty shootout with a twist!