Originally Posted by
Eric the Half a Bee
Not wishing to put a damper on a much needed win, but there's a long way to go before I'll consider this side capable of a playoff push.
I've been looking at whoscored.com at a comparison of stats between this season and the 2017/18 promotion season to see if there's any difference to why we haven't been nearly as effective this season. There's not a great deal of difference. This season we're playing slightly fewer long balls and our short passing accuracy is better. On the down side, we're not getting quite as many crosses into the box, we're having more shots from outside the box than inside than we did 2 seasons ago, we're getting more in more defensive blocks but are allowing slightly more crosses to come into our box and are making slightly fewer tackles. We're only talking minute differences, but maybe these differences are having an effect. One stat I can't find is to see how many shots we've faced as I reckon that is substantially higher than 2 years ago.
As most fans seem to agree, Birmingham should have put the game out of sight before we were given a route back into it. The atmosphere would have been very different had that happened. Thankfully they didn't and we deserved the win on our second half performance.
15 games gone - 8 against sides below us, 7 against sides above us. 1.5 points a game against sides below us, just under 1.3 against sides above us. Our remaining 8 games in the first half of this season see only 2 of those games against sides below us. If 75 points is the holy grail of the playoffs, we're already looking at nearly 1.75 points a game - an already significant increase on our efforts so far. If we keep up our form against sides above and below us, we'll be at 32 points at the halfway stage and looking at an unlikely 1.89 points a game.
I reckon 4 wins and a couple of draws are the minimum from these next 8 games. 2 wins in our last 6 isn't going to be anywhere near good enough.