The "do they mean us?" thread

[Carl the Llama]

Of course we don't have rivals.  Can't really be held accountable for the dearth of similarly competent teams in our immediate area though can we?  Derby look the closest to being able to call themselves our rivals but they've still a ways to go yet.

[themoralkiosk]

My favourite thing about this season is how people are being forced to change their opinions, and it really highlights the ignorance of most football fans (i'm sure we're all guilty of it occasionally too). 

 

September - "Mahrez is the only good player, the rest are championship standard" 

 

October - "Two man team, the rest are championship at best" 

 

November - "Three man team, if Kante, Mahrez or Vardy gets injured they're ****ed"

 

December - "Apart from Vardy, Mahrez, Kante and Drinkwater they are bang average, the bubble will burst after christmas"

 

 

Long may it continue, hopefully by May the whole team will have been noticed. 

 

And what have the Romans ever done for us?

[CosbehFox]

Selhurst in March is looking fun

One of the best things is winding them up at the moment with our performances on and off the pitch.

There's this undercurrent at Palace where because they are a London club and have this large catchment, they are somehow destined for the Champions League. The potential is there no doubt but any article or interview with Palace's management; its 'project', 'potential', 'when we sort out the stadium'

That's what is so lovely about our form at the moment. There's an innocence to it almost. To top it off its from a club outside of London or the North West

Edited 21 December 2015 by Cardiff_Fox

[Littletoe]

We have no Rivals, because everyone else around us in the East Midlands are shit. 

[Lestoh]

We have no Rivals, because everyone else around us in the East Midlands are shit.

But Forest aren't shit, they've got 2 stars on their badge! It's just a dry patch. 30 year dry patch.

[Gerard]

Wait until they start slagging us off on the Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich forums. 

[HighPeakFox]

Cool stats : "It is Leicester’s efficiency that is their most impressive attribute. Five shots on target and 33% possession produced three goals and three more points. They have at least five points more than any other Premier League team and yet rank 18th in terms of possession and 19th for passes completed. Leicester have stuck to their counter-attacking strategy and maximised it to the full. Who needs a Plan B when Plan A is so damn effective? This efficiency is also demonstrated by their shot conversion rate, the highest in the division at 20.9%. In fact, the gap between Leicester and third place in that list is greater than the gap between third and 14th."

 

From here - http://www.football365.com/news/premier-league-winners-and-losers-15

[Lestoh]

Wait until they start slagging us off on the Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich forums.

Zey ahr a tinpot club, who even uzez ze clap banners?! Nein rivals, ze third best team in ze East Midlands

Edited 21 December 2015 by Lestoh

[lgfualol]

So many bitter fans, we've been back in the Prem for 1.5 seasons and already top of the league by Christmas while playing great football. You have clubs that have been in this league for years that have never done this well in 17 games.

[Collibosher70]

lol

That club/forum is fantastic entertainment, the bitterness is next level.

'Championship divs' from a club that's closest Cup win was once being runners-up in the FA Cup and winning the Simod Cup

I understand why some on here disagree with my views on Ultra culture but these are the case study, it's turned them into absolute egomaniacs and because we've overshadowed them recently in the media with our atmosphere they've turned to hating us rather than appreciate it's something refreshing for football like we would if it was West Ham or Watford (who are still doing fantastically). It must be hard when in under a year they've gone from #1 Ultras saviours of the English football atmosphere to being outdone by us and Watford

He doesn't like us much does he !

[Captain...]

Cool stats : "It is Leicester’s efficiency that is their most impressive attribute. Five shots on target and 33% possession produced three goals and three more points. They have at least five points more than any other Premier League team and yet rank 18th in terms of possession and 19th for passes completed. Leicester have stuck to their counter-attacking strategy and maximised it to the full. Who needs a Plan B when Plan A is so damn effective? This efficiency is also demonstrated by their shot conversion rate, the highest in the division at 20.9%. In fact, the gap between Leicester and third place in that list is greater than the gap between third and 14th."

 

From here - http://www.football365.com/news/premier-league-winners-and-losers-15

 

I think pundits still don't quite get it, we have poor possession and passing stats because every time we have the ball we  look to attack, we don't play counter attacking football, we just play attacking football, every time we have the ball we attack, we attack with pace and in numbers. We win the ball back anywhere and everywhere on the pitch and attack.

 

Counter attacking is sitting deep and drawing teams on to us before hitting them on the break, which is not our plan, of course it happens, like a break away goal from a corner. But our tactics are to press high and win the ball back as high up the pitch as possible and see it as a potential attack. We know that a through ball for Vardy or whoever is high risk and has to be perfectly weighted, typically they have less than 50% accuracy/success rate, so we try and do it as often as possible, we lose the ball or get in a great position.

 

It is not efficiency it is about creating better goal scoring opportunities and creating them quickly, we haven't scored from outside the box yet this season, but that is because we rarely shoot from there, if we are outside the box we look to get it into the box and to feet. We have the best shot conversion rate because we create better chances by getting the ball into the box quickly before the defence is set and giving the striker the best chance of scoring.

[ScouseFox]

running out of laughs for crystal palace, hilarious club and hilarious fans. 

 

 

in other news, we now officially rank in the top 50 clubs in europe based on the euro club index.

 

[foxes_rule1978]

running out of laughs for crystal palace, hilarious club and hilarious fans.

in other news, we now officially rank in the top 50 clubs in europe based on the euro club index.

https://twitter.com/EuroClubIndex/status/678919426348052480

This season is like my football manager game, incredible... nearly up there with ac Milan

[Carl the Llama]

We are massive.

[foxes_rule1978]

running out of laughs for crystal palace, hilarious club and hilarious fans.

in other news, we now officially rank in the top 50 clubs in europe based on the euro club index.

https://twitter.com/EuroClubIndex/status/678919426348052480

Our next target is to get on top of this table now

[Corky]

I liked the Championship divs comment as a dig. Let's look at the mighty Palace's last five years in that division: 15th, 21st, 20th, 17th, 5th. And let's look at ours: 5th, 10th, 9th, 6th, 1st.

 

Even in the divs league we're much better.

[fuchsntf]

Selhurst in March is looking fun

One of the best things is winding them up at the moment with our performances on and off the pitch.

There's this undercurrent at Palace where because they are a London club and have this large catchment, they are somehow destined for the Champions League. The potential is there no doubt but any article or interview with Palace's management; its 'project', 'potential', 'when we sort out the stadium'

That's what is so lovely about our form at the moment. There's an innocence to it almost. To top it off its from a club outside of London or the North West

To be fair, I know quite a few palace fans, in UK and here in Germany, few like their own forum or at least, the negatives going around, on it. I met up with some English lads at the weekend,

all from London clubs, obviously there was the usual banter, but all happy with the suprise clubs, no spite, no well that, or this club having it easy...

Many agreeing that in forums, once shown and written down the noggheads tend to stick out, and are negative ,no matter what,against all and sundary. In fairness Pardew has made humerous wise cracks, but just this week spoke over his admiration what the foxes have achieved.

2 Spurs fans saying , bloody marvellous, Spurs best chance of top 4, now suddenly 3-4 other clubs

coming from nowhere, upsetting the applecart....but great to see....

Even these lads, were saying its great to see experts, pundits and local london press, squirming to come up with any decent reports, or all waiting the for the old form to return.

The lads thoughts on the London various clubs terraces and pubs, is that if Arsenal get majority of their injured players back, its their Title, but if Palace a n d W.Ham, and the Watford (honary london cousin) upstarts could squeeze into top 6 places, and blow the Manchester clubs out of the top 4, London would have a a great mayday.

These lads said they and their friends would love Leicester to hold it right to the end.

Edited 21 December 2015 by fuchsntf

[Bilo]

lol

 

That club/forum is fantastic entertainment, the bitterness is next level.

 

'Championship divs' from a club that's closest Cup win was once being runners-up in the FA Cup and winning the Simod Cup

 

I understand why some on here disagree with my views on Ultra culture but these are the case study, it's turned them into absolute egomaniacs and because we've overshadowed them recently in the media with our atmosphere they've turned to hating us rather than appreciate it's something refreshing for football like we would if it was West Ham or Watford (who are still doing fantastically). It must be hard when in under a year they've gone from #1 Ultras saviours of the English football atmosphere to being outdone by us and Watford

 

In fairness, I think a lot of the egomaniacs are those basking in the reflective glory of the HF rather than HF members themselves. I don't think a lot of them post on the ordinary forums all that often from what I've heard, though it's quite clear that the HF themselves are snidey little pricks. 

 

The Championship Divs and No Rivals lines were absolutely classic - they can't even get Millwall to care about them and have the kind of history that Coventry would sneer at.

[Bilo]

running out of laughs for crystal palace, hilarious club and hilarious fans. 

 

 

in other news, we now officially rank in the top 50 clubs in europe based on the euro club index.

 

 

This is a really interesting point to be honest. Does anybody know how the seedings and club coefficients would work if we were to qualify for the CL? Obviously we'd get a few points from the national coefficient as the Premier League is ranked second in Europe, but with no recent action in Europe I expect that our club coefficient rating would be a bit low.

 

Presumably we'd be in the same pot as teams like Wolfsburg who have little experience of Europe but play in a top league rather than teams like Galatasaray who regularly qualify but play in a comparatively weak league. It'd certainly make the draws interesting, as we'd only need finish in the top three of any group to guarantee European football of some description till February at least, should we actually make it that far at least. 

[Freesolo]

Its all about entitlement what gives one club the right to win leagues and cups just because they have a massive bank, every team in the last 15 years has done it off some rich owner, then a team like Leicester that YoYos up and down the leagues comes along and pisses on the parade. Its not the big teams that care its not even the little teams that care its the teams that hand around 8th to 15th in the prem every year getting nowhere they don't like that fact that somehow we are achieving something it pisses them off that they have tried and failed for years.

maybe if they didn't sell all their best players to rich teams teams they might get somewhere, its not the fans fault its the greedy club that is happy with mediocrity.  

[Captain...]

Its all about entitlement what gives one club the right to win leagues and cups just because they have a massive bank, every team in the last 15 years has done it off some rich owner, then a team like Leicester that YoYos up and down the leagues comes along and pisses on the parade. Its not the big teams that care its not even the little teams that care its the teams that hand around 8th to 15th in the prem every year getting nowhere they don't like that fact that somehow we are achieving something it pisses them off that they have tried and failed for years.

maybe if they didn't sell all their best players to rich teams teams they might get somewhere, its not the fans fault its the greedy club that is happy with mediocrity.  

 

That's a rather simplistic view, it is often the player pushing for a move, or the club not wanting to keep a player who doesn't want to be there, rather than a greedy club, this also doesn't factor that TV money has only recently sky rocketed to the point that all PL clubs are mega rich, clubs like Southampton were operating at a big loss unless they sold, that will no longer be the case.

 

Even with the new TV deal money, they will not be able to keep a player like Mane even if they wanted to match the wages if they can't offer CL football and Man United can (a big if at the moment). CL teams will always be able to attract players from "smaller" clubs with European football and with the Bosman ruling meaning players will always have an out clubs have to sell before they lose all their investment.

 

Where we have got lucky is that all of our players have come together at the same time, if Mahrez or Vardy had been playing at this level last season, but we finished 14th, then we would have struggled to keep them in the summer. They would have understandably felt they could progress at a bigger club rather than being big fish in a small pond. Instead nobody was interested in our players in the Summer which meant we could add players like Kante and Fuchs and hit the ground running as a team and despite Vardy and Mahrez grabbing the headlines they feel like they are part of an excellent team and not just carrying it.

Edited 21 December 2015 by Captain...

[Lestoh]

We're bigger than Stoke, official

[AndyElZorro]

My apologies if this has already been posted:

 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gametheory/2015/12/competitive-balance-football?fsrc=email_to_a_friend

 

Why the English Premier League has been turned upside down

 

IF ON the opening day of the 2015-16 English Premier League (EPL) season, you had marched into your local bookmaker and bet on lowly Leicester City to sit at the top of the division on Christmas Day, you would have elicited a chuckle from other wizened punters in the shop. The 1,500-to-one odds on your ticket might not have seemed long enough. The Foxes spent more time in last place than any other side last season, escaping the relegation zone (the bottom three places, from which teams get demoted to a lower division) with barely a month left to play. Of the 20 teams in the league, only the three promoted from the Championship, English football’s second tier, were given a slimmer chance than Leicester’s 5,000-to-one hope of winning the competition.

If you had placed another wager on Chelsea, the reigning champions, to be in 15th place come Yuletide, the giggles would have swelled to guffaws. Last season’s Blues were the first team in EPL history to lead the league wire to wire: they held at least a share of first place every day from start to finish. They were often compared to the unbeaten Arsenal “Invincibles” side of 2003-04 and Manchester United’s treble-winning squad of 1998-99, albeit without emulating either feat. In fact, most gambling companies wouldn’t have offered the bet: you could have taken 250 to one for Chelsea to finish in the bottom half, or 7,500 to one for the club to be relegated. Perhaps a generous bookie might have staked a mere 1,000 to one against Chelsea dropping into the bottom six in the depths of December.

The derision would have been worth it. Chelsea’s champions, who have won 50 major domestic and European titles between them, have looked like novices this season, and sit just three places above the relegation zone as the league approaches its halfway point. Their manager, José Mourinho—renowned not only for his success but for his unshakeable self-confidence—was sacked on December 17th after breaking the unenviable record of theworst season-to-season decline in the history of top-flight football in England. Leicester’s squad, many of whom are graduates of the lower English leagues, possess only three major medals in their collective cabinets. Yet contrary to everyone’s expectations, they have played like seasoned winners, exposing the vulnerabilities of more favoured opponents with swift and clinical attacks, and have risen to the top of the table—the position that they will hold on Christmas Day.

There could be no neater demonstration of the two sides’ opposite trajectories than their meeting on December 14th at Leicester’s King Power Stadium. The hosts’ opening goal came after half an hour, just as the commentators had begun to wonder when they might see “a signature counter-attack from Leicester City”. In the ensuing ten seconds, the home side muscled Chelsea off the ball in midfield, carried it deep into the final third, and worked it past the visitors’ defence into the back of the net. It was a timely reminder of Leicester’s offensive efficiency, and was engineered by two of the club’s key players, both of whom have their own rags-to-riches tales. The lofted assist into the box was provided by Riyad Mahrez, an Algerian winger whom Leicester plucked from the obscurity of the French second division—and who is currently second in both the Premier League’s assist and goal charts. His cross was volleyed in by Jamie Vardy, a striker who looked destined for a career in the semi-professional divisions until Leicester signed him four years ago; he recently broke the league record for the longest streak of scoring in consecutive games. Chelsea’s captain, John Terry, had allowed the pass to reach Mr Vardy, in an error that would have been unthinkable for such a reliable defender just months ago. But this season such mistakes have become typical for the Blues’ back four. No eyebrows were raised when Mr Terry, a member of the 2014-15 Professional Footballers’ Association’s Team of the Year, was hauled off by Mr Mourinho early in the second half, shortly after Mr Mahrez had fired in a fine second goal.

The match remained interesting, as Chelsea rallied and scored themselves. But they were unable to overturn the 2-1 deficit, leaving the Foxes just one victory away from guaranteeing the top spot at Christmas, an opportunity which they duly took by beating Everton 3-2 on December 19th. For Mr Mourinho, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, made even harder to bear by the fact that Leicester’s coach is Claudio Ranieri—the man whom Chelsea dismissed in 2004 to make way for Mr Mourinho’s first spell at the club.

Leicester’s improbable rise and Chelsea’s unprecedented fall have certainly been the biggest shocks of the 2015-16 season. But they are far from the only ones. Plucky West Ham have beaten Arsenal (at odds of 11 to one), Manchester City (11 to one) and Liverpool (eight to one) away from home. In the last fortnight, tiny Bournemouth have vanquished Manchester United and Chelsea, whilst struggling Newcastle have beaten both Tottenham and Liverpool—combinations that according to bookmakers were respectively 3% and 2% likely. Perhaps the only predictable feature of the Premier League in 2015-16 has been the regularity with which pundits have described it as the most unpredictable season ever. According to the betting lines, 42 of 160 games (26%) thus far have been won by the underdogs; since the turn of the century, no Premier League season has ended with the unfavoured teams winning more than 23% of matches (see chart below).

The rate of upsets may yet fall away as the season unfolds. But it certainly seems that the gap in ability between the best and the rest has shrunk in 2015-16. One way of measuring this is with an Elo system, a simple points-exchange mechanism developed by the physicist Arpad Elo for chess and now used in many sports. It awards credit to the winner of a match and subtracts it from the loser, taking into account the strength of competition, final score, home-field advantage and importance of the contest. A paper published in 2013 by mathematicians from the Universities of Warsaw and Amsterdam found that Elo is better at predicting international football outcomes than the world rankings produced by FIFA, the sport’s global administrating body. And when applied to the Premier League, Elo confirms the popular narrative. The standard deviation of the division’s Elo scores measures how tightly distributed teams’ strengths are: the smaller that number is, the closer the twenty teams’ rankings are to each other. This year’s mark is the lowest the indicator has been at this point in the season since 2003-04 (see chart above).

This year’s topsy-turvy league table should be a welcome sight for the EPL, which has long been dominated by a handful of rich clubs: in the past decade, only six different sides have finished in the top four positions, from which teams qualify for the Champions League, Europe’s most prestigious competition. But half a season of unusual parity is well within the range of random fluctuation, and the ascent of Leicester and collapse of Chelsea do not necessarily mean that the lords of the Premiership should rest easy. Whether the league’s competitive-balance woes have really come to an end or are merely on a brief, welcome hiatus depends mainly on whether there is any lasting structural change that could account for a shrinking gap between haves and have-nots.

The first place to hunt for explanations is money. In February the EPL signed a new television deal worth £5 billion ($7.5 billion) per year. These revenues will be distributed fairly evenly among clubs: the champions will receive around £150m, and the worst performer £99m. In contrast, in Spain’s La Liga, the two leading teams gobble up about half of the entire league’s broadcast income. This arrangement could certainly explain why English teams as a group might improve relative to other leagues. But it cannot account for greater parity within the EPL, because the payout formula has not changed. The Premiership’s relatively egalitarian split of television revenues was fixed in 1991 and has never budged; clubs are simply receiving the same share of a larger pie.

Another potential factor is Financial Fair Play (FFP), a European scheme to prevent rich owners from buying championships by pouring unlimited wealth into loss-making clubs. In theory, FFP should improve competitive balance by shrinking the budgets of teams owned by billionaires. In practice, it has simply frozen the pre-existing hierarchy in place. Clubs that have already built up large non-television revenue streams—primarily Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and the two Manchester teams—remain free to invest the cash they receive from merchandise and ticket sales in player acquisitions, while their weaker rivals no longer can hope to enter the top tier by finding a profligate patron. Just four of the EPL’s 20 clubs—Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City—accounted for roughly half of this year’s summer transfer spending.

So the explanations for the surprising results are more likely to be found on the football pitch itself than in clubs’ account books. One measure of performance suggests that the yawning gap in the league table between Chelsea and Leicester City may overstate the difference in how well the two sides have played. Although shooting and disrupting opponents’ shots are vital skills in football, in many cases the outcome of a shot is all but predetermined: even Cristiano Ronaldo is unlikely to have much success launching shots from the halfway line, and even an amateur player might score on a decent share of chances fired directly in front of the goal.

A popular statistic that evaluates the quality of a team’s shots and those of its opponents is “expected goals” (xG), which estimates how many goals an average EPL team would have scored and conceded given the location of each shot in its matches, as well as the type of attack in which it occurred and the kind of pass that led to it. Teams with outstanding strikers will tend to score more often than their average shot quality would suggest, and those with top-notch defenders and goalkeepers will tend to allow fewer. Nonetheless, very large differentials between actual and expected goals can be hard to sustain. And according to the xG model published by Michael Caley, a football blogger, both of this season’s most surprising clubs have sharply diverged from expectations: Leicester City have scored 46% more goals than their shot quality would indicate, and Chelsea have allowed 68% more goals than their opponents’ shots would usually generate. Some of the blame for the latter showing must rest with Chelsea’s goalkeepers. But in their defence, they have had the misfortune to face some exceedingly well-executed shots, such as Steven Naismith’s final two goals in the team’s 3-2 defeat to Everton, Marko Arnautovic’s acrobatic winner in a 1-0 loss to Stoke, and both of West Ham’s goals in a 2-1 defeat. Mr Mahrez’s outrageous curled strike against them for Leicester was the latest in a series of unlikely winners. It is highly unlikely that Chelsea’s rivals will continue to deliver the ball to precisely the right spot in the net under such challenging conditions with this frequency.

On the other hand, such flukey differences cannot come close to accounting for all of the turmoil in the EPL this season. Even if one were to re-calculate the standings using expected rather than actual goals, the current table would still look like none other in recent memory. The other engine of unpredictability this season appears to be an acceleration of the never-ending cycle of innovation, in which clubs devise new strategies to exploit opponents’ weaknesses, and their rivals respond with counter-tactics designed to neutralise these methods that make them vulnerable to different ones, leaving the process to begin anew.

There is no single “right” or “best” way to play football: different championship teams have deployed virtually all of the common strategies in the sport over the years. But this equivalence does not mean that tactical choices don’t matter. Much of the skill in managing lies with devising the scheme that maximises the impact of the strengths of a specific group of players while minimising the costs of their weaknesses. As squads turn over and players develop and age, clubs must either adjust their strategies to a new mix of talent, or recruit new blood that is well-suited to their existing approach. And in the Darwinian maelstrom that is the EPL, Leicester City seems to have mastered the “adapt or die” mantra, while Chelsea is falling victim to it.

Chelsea’s 2014-15 squad took a methodical path to a title. They moved the ball forward step by step with crisp, precise passing, keeping it out of their opponents’ hands for as long as possible and trying to route it to the sides of the pitch where Eden Hazard, an exceedingly creative winger, could dribble through traffic towards the penalty area. Using figures provided by the sports-data agency Opta, Dan Altman, the founder of the football-statistics firm North Yard Analytics (and a former journalist for The Economist), calculates that Chelsea’s non-header shots from open play followed attacks in which they advanced the ball at just 3.9 metres (13 feet) per second (m/s) last year, the second-slowest pace in the EPL. However, their players were so skilled that they frequently managed to slip the ball between opposing defenders and fire off shots from close range: on average, their chances came closer than 20 metres from goal, which was better than all but three teams in the division. Mr Altman estimates that a typical team would score on a healthy 10.5% of the club’s shots (excluding headers) last season.But half a year can prove an eternity in the demanding world of top-flight football. Mr Mourinho asks more of his core players than any other coach in the game: last year his top ten regulars were on the pitch in over 80% of the minutes in EPL and Champions League competition, by far the highest mark over the past five seasons. In recognition of their heavy workload, he started training two weeks later this year. But Chelsea failed to bring in any new everyday players during the summer transfer window who might have been better-rested, and the shortened preseason may not have given his stars enough time to get back into form. Mr Mourinho stuck to his slow-paced guns this year, crawling up the field at a snail’s pace of 3.5 m/s. His players, however, have been far less successful at carving up opposing defences: their average shot this year has been launched 1.8 metres further from the goal. Other attributes of their shots, such as the angle and likely defensive pressure, have also been inferior. According to Mr Altman, a normal EPL club would sneak just 6.5% of those attempts past the keeper, tied for the worst shot quality in the league.

In contrast, while Chelsea nearly stood still during the transfer period, Leicester City went shopping for the missing piece of the puzzle for a strategy built around lightning-quick counter-attacks. Mr Vardy’s ability to out-run defenders was already clear, and the club had tried to cash in on this strength by aiming to push the ball up the pitch as fast as possible: their average advancing speed of 4.9 m/s ranked fourth in the EPL last season. However, their lack of a quality distributor of the ball in the middle of the park meant that they often failed to pick out their forward runners on counter-attacks, preventing them from obtaining precious break-away chances.

What Leicester City needed was a disruptive midfielder willing to gamble on intercepting passes and aggressive tackles, so that opponents would be caught in transition and unable to set up their defences before Mr Vardy blew past them. And they found the perfect fit in N’Golo Kanté, an uncapped Frenchman previously employed by SM Caen, the fastest-paced team in continental Europe. Transferring Mr Kanté cost them just €9m ($9.8m), and he has already justified that investment many times over. He currently leads the league in interceptions, and Mr Altman calculates that when he touches the ball in the middle or back of the pitch, shots on the subsequent attack are 70% likelier to yield a goal than when he isn’t involved.

Chelsea and Leicester City may lie at two opposite extremes of pace and style, but they are indicative of a broader league-wide trend. As recently as last year, there appeared to be a clear trade-off in EPL football between speed on one side and penetration on the other. Teams that moved the ball quickly upfield—led by the three relegated sides, Burnley, Queens Park Rangers and Hull City—tended to settle for chances far from the goal that were unlikely to yield a score, whereas more plodding clubs like Chelsea could take the time to identify weak spots and probe closer to their target. In statistical terms, the correlation between pace and average shot distance was 0.35 (where one is a perfect relationship and zero is none whatsoever). But during this season, that link seems to have been broken: some quick teams, like Leicester City or Newcastle United, are also among the league leaders in shortest shot distance, whereas some slower ones, such as Chelsea or Swansea City, have struggled to get close to goal at all. The overall correlation has now fallen to a virtually nonexistent 0.06. This suggests that a handful of clubs have managed to come up with new strategies that their opponents have not yet figured out how to counter—a new source of variance among clubs (in addition to raw player quality) that may be one cause of the EPL’s increasing unpredictability.

With less than half the season played, there is more than enough time for this pattern to reverse. Against Leicester City, midfielders should eventually learn to swarm quickly around Mr Kanté and his central partner Daniel Drinkwater, thereby cutting off the supply of direct passes up-field and giving the defence more time to deal with the twin threats of Mr Vardy and Mr Mahrez. Slowing down the Foxes is the key to beating them, as it neutralises the value of their strikers’ speed and forces them to make far more passes than they would prefer: for example, following an interception 60 metres from the opposing goal, Mr Altman calculates that Leicester City will score around 2% of the time if they pass the ball 60 metres on their counter-attack, but just 0.5% of the time if they pass it 90 metres, and a mere 0.1% following 120 metres’ worth of passing. Now that Leicester City have a firm hold on the league lead, opposing coaches will surely pay more attention to reining in their dangerous midfielders in the season’s second half. As for Chelsea, Mr Mourinho's successor—which will be the Dutch coach Guus Hiddink on an interim basis, a role which he has performed for the Blues before—will probably try to reduce the team’s reliance on Mr Hazard by varying the speed and direction of its attacks. He could also hope to dip into the pocket of the club’s billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich, and acquire reinforcements during the January transfer window. 

Given the magnitude of Leicester City’s advantage over hapless Chelsea so far, such a sharp reversal might seem unlikely. But Mr Caley still believes that Chelsea are the better team: his projections published after the sixteenth round of games, which are based on a team’s current ability to produce and prevent chances and are regressed towards prior performances, give the Blues an additional 38.5 points over the season’s final 22 games, compared with just 29.8 for Leicester City. That would still leave Leicester City comfortably ahead for the whole season, with 64.8 total points to 53.5 for Chelsea, but just barely in the top four. Mr Caley’s model is sufficiently unimpressed with the Foxes’ breakout that it assigned them just a 2% chance of holding onto their lead by season’s end, and sufficiently undisturbed by Chelsea’s collapse that it gives them a mere 1% chance of relegation. Mr Hiddink’s fight for Premier League survival has certainly started well, with a 3-1 victory over fellow strugglers Sunderand on December 19th, even as the Chelsea fans chanted the name of their beloved former coach, and jeered the players—some of whom have been accused of deliberately underperforming to get Mr Mourinho sacked. Current betting lines back them to rediscover their form: at the time of writing, bookmakers give Chelsea a 40-to-one (2.5%) chance of relegation. After beating Everton in their 17th match, Leicester’s odds of a fairy-tale title win have been cut to 13 to one (7%). So if you were to march into your local betting shop today with two more wagers on these clubs in the same direction, the odds would still be heavily stacked against you. But the mirth from the seasoned gamblers would surely have disappeared.

[The Year Of The Fox]

http://dcfcfans.uk/topic/20924-are-leicester-genuine-title-contenders/?page=1

[johnny the fox]

http://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2015/12/21/lord-sugar-makes-his-opinion-of-leicester-known/page/1/ Well Lord Sugar...he say yes..