by Lee Hurley

The fact is there are only 16 games left to go in the league and Arsenal are top. They’ve played everyone once and they have collected more points than anyone else so far. Not just this season, either, they were consistently the best team in the country in 2013. This is no flash in the consistency pan from the north London side.

It’s a good theory, but one which neglects to take in to account a major study which looked at 80 league champions across the top four major leagues [England, Spain, Italy, Germany] between 1991 and 2010, which showed that the top scorers only won the league 51 per cent of the time. Scoring loads does not, it seems, guarantee you a title.

Perhaps someone should tell the media about this.

Having the best defence isn’t a guarantee either with the team which conceded the least goals winning the title 46 per cent of the time, in case you were wondering. What is needed is a balance between the two as well as consistency.

The fact is there are only 16 games left to go in the league and Arsenal are top. They’ve played everyone once and they have collected more points than anyone else so far. Not just this season, either, they were consistently the best team in the country in 2013. This is no flash in the consistency pan from the north London side.

It would be fair to say that the title race is too close to call, something you won’t hear many pundits admit. No-one expected Arsenal to be at the top of the league, they never do.

For the past seven or eight years Arsenal have been the ones all the so-called experts have been predicting would drop out of the top four. That didn’t work out too well for them. This season that’s where Arsenal were supposed to be, battling for fourth place, not 14 points ahead of the current champions despite losing to them.

Manchester City might have scored four against Cardiff at home but they conceded two as well. Wrong offside flags have saved them from conceding even more than they did against Arsenal, Newcastle and Liverpool.

Arsenal, on the other hand, have conceded only one goal at home in the last nine games in all competitions. Since they shipped six at the Eithad they’ve conceded two goals in seven games, home and away. That’s the same number City conceded on Saturday in case you missed that bit above.

All season we’ve heard that if City sort out their away form, the league is in the bag, but at what point does it become obvious it is still an issue? Is it when they draw at Blackburn in the FA Cup? Or what about when they need a dodgy decision to overcome Newcastle?

None of this means I’m discounting City, far from it; I may be biased but I’m not insane. They are only one point behind Arsenal so it would be stupid to rule them or Chelsea out.

But the key point there is ‘behind Arsenal’ – it’s time Arsenal were taken seriously and not dismissed so easily. They are scoring, they are keeping clean sheets [the most in the league] and but for the nine goals conceded in two games which were aberrations, they’ve conceded just 10 in the other 20 and not more than one in any of those. They’ve done all this while having more injuries than any other team in the league and a number of key players missing for most of the season.

No-one is running away with this league because, for now, they simply can’t get past Arsenal.

I wonder when that will become the narrative?

 

———————————-

Source: Metro Sport, UK

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.