10.89 - A Good Start (Pt 1 of 2)

"I'm not going to look at the league table until 10 games in. Nothing's really happened until then, and you can never tell after one game where anyone's going to end up"

Well, now. Well, now. Is that the case? Remember Southampton's slow start last season? Remember that Millwall were crippled by injuries and had to surge through. Remember also that Leeds were many points clear before their collapse, and Brighton were top of the league from very early on. So does that make a difference.

I'm going to take the answer to this in two parts and owe Jonathan Wilson (@jonawils) a massive debt of gratitude for the tools to solve this particular puzzle. I'm going to work with the seasons from 2006/07 to last year (five seasons, and fifteen promoted teams) to seek my answers, and hope to come to a conclusion.

How important is a good start? After 5 games, what sort of indication did we have that teams were going to prosper, or flounder? Mr Wilson worked his tallies out by comparing actual points tallies (% of final points totals) with the expected points percentages if they were gathered evenly throughout the season. I saw no reason to mess with his formula, though obviously, my sights were set a little lower than the top of the Premiership and my numbers a little more difficult to pin down.

As it happens, I was a little surprised by what I found – the variety was large but, by and large, the expected points tally (10.87%) was nowhere near matched, except in 2009/10, when Leeds' start swept all before them, and led to the three promoted sides gathering 10.90% of their total tallies in the first five games (as near as damn an average figure as you're likely to find).

The other four seasons saw the promoted teams doing a bit of struggling while things levelled themselves out, from only 13 points (5.02%) in 2006/07 up to a more respectable 8.65% in 2010/11 – while Southampton dallied, Brighton and Peterborough's houses got into order pretty quickly.

This can only help to illustrate that the extreme beginning of the season is really no indication at all of where teams will finish, as can checking what was happening with those teams who were going to drop out of the division in May, those four unfortunates. Well, I thought this was going to prove to be an opposite story at first, but it seems that Brentford's glorious start and collapse was something of an anomaly, matched by the decent starts of Bradford, Chesterfield and Rotherham to create the illusion that a good start generally meant a bad end to the season. Of course, as we've seen above, there's a distinct regression to the mean with these early games, and the first five seem to go out of their way to prove that – 18.44% of their total tallies that the 2006/07 relegation vintage had gathered is almost double the rest of the tallies, and explains why the average figure (11.36%) is a touch over the 10.87% we'd expect if the games were equal across the season. The fact is, though, that 11.36% is a good deal higher than 7.60%, which indicates one thing very clearly – teams start a lot more evenly than they finish. The promoted teams gathered 100 point between 15 of them, while the relegated teams gathered the same figure amongst 20 – not a massive difference between 5 points and 6.67 points at the time, but that difference comes to translate into a lot at the end of the season – it would work out at a difference between 54 and 72 points, which is sizeable indeed.

Town then, don't need to worry if they don't set the world on fire at the start of the season. As we discovered last year, the best work is done after Christmas.

Next time, I see if 10 games into the season is more revelatory.

1 1 1 - The End Of The Beginning - Post 44

Saturday was the first day of the season and, however you spin it, a 1-1 draw at home is disappointing. I wasn't going into the game expecting Bury to be brushed aside, I was thinking they'd put up some stubborn resistance but Town would probably have a bit too much in the end; (a Draw/Home scenario, possibly 2-1 or 3-1). Of course, that's not how it panned out, and it made the season open with a bit of a damp squib.

But is it the end of the world. How likely is an opening day draw to curtail promotion hopes, or result in disappointment? Well, we don't know. We won't do until May. In the meantime, I've collated tables of the opening day results from the last five years for all teams promoted within the Football League (10 each season). I remember some of them – Southampton's defeat at home to Plymouth, who ended up relegated, for example – Norwich's 1-7 defeat was the stuff of legend, but they also lost 3-2 at Watford on Sky on the first day of last season. I don't think it matters a bean, to be honest. A 1-7 defeat would instigate a bit of worry, and I'd expect changes, but a slowish start shouldn't matter at all.

So here we go.

My prediction, for once, was correct. Hurrah!

It doesn't matter a bean what you do in your first game, then. Promotion, if it is to be yours, will be yours.

Other than that Norwich 1-7 Colchester, which is a curio in and of itself, 50%, or five, as its also known, of the promoted teams in 2009/10 drew 1-1 in their first matches – Newcastle Utd and West Bromwich Albion against one another.