Spurs Upside/ Downside

In idle moments when I’m not thinking about buying presents for my fiancé, I keep a mental tally of Tottenham’s progress this season vs the same fixtures last year.

I.e., in 2010-11 we drew at home to Man City, but in 2011-12 we lost. So we’re down a point there. But last year we only drew at home to Arsenal, and this year we won, so that’s 2pts up. And so on.

And this season vs last season has been going well. Really well. Lots of upside, very little downside. We’re 11 points better off than we were from the same games last year. We’re 3rd in the table and generally considered the best Spurs side since 1961.

So I thought I’d make the same comparison with 2009-10 season, when we qualified for the Champions League. It gets a bit more flaky the further back you go (more teams have been promoted/ relegated), but still - it would be nice to find that we’re ahead even of our best ever EPL season.

Except, in that case, the difference is… 0. Nothing. Exactly the same amount of points from the same subset of games. Which suggests there’s plenty more work to do in the second half of the season, even to equal the 2009-10 tally.

I was quite surprised (and a bit disappointed). Player for player we’re a better team than 2 years ago. Walker>Corluka, Adebayor>Crouch, Parker>Palacios, VdV>Kranjcar, Bale11>Bale09, etc. And our points-per-game so far is much better - 2.24, vs 1.84 in 2009-10, and 1.63 in 2010-11. And everyone says we’re better. Even Steve Claridge likes us now.

And of course, this is all a little meaningless- lots of variables that the stats don’t account for (changes in strength/ form of opponents, injuries, etc)- and I’m sure Harry isn’t concerning himself with similar comparisons at all.

But it’s a note of caution, at least, before we start to fully believe our own hype about the current side.

For our final 20 games, the 2009-10 equivalents worked out as W9 D5 L7; given our form so far this year, the same (at least) should be possible. I hope.