Category: Football

Premier League Relegation: Don’t rule out another Great Escape

Andrew Atherley picks out some FA Cup semi-final scoring patterns and tells us why fans of Hull and Burnley have plenty of reasons to be optimistic about their chances of avoiding the drop. “Either of those scenarios would see a re-evaluation of the Relegation 2009/10 odds, and recent history shows it is not too late for a seemingly doomed team to escape the drop.” FA Cup patterns become more set in the later rounds of the competition, and there are a couple of trends worth noting for this weekend’s semi-finals. Here’s one pattern: 1-0, 1-0, 1-0, 1-0 – that’s the string of results in the last four semi-finals contested by two teams from outside the established big four of English football. It’s a small sample of results, but it might just be a sign of how careful teams become when they can sense what might be a once-in-a-career chance of reaching an FA Cup final. That impression is backed up by results in all semi-finals involving a pair of non-big four teams since the mid-1990s – seven out of nine had under 2.5 goals (in fact, all of those seven had under 1.5 goals) and the only ones that went over 2.5 goals had a lower-league team on the losing side. Sunday’s Tottenham v Portsmouth semi-final will be a low-scoring affair if it conforms to the pattern, but that goes against market expectation