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"Wycombe woes shows PPG ruin" , according to Martin Samuel in Daily Mail

Wycombe woes show PPG ruin
The worst team across the top five divisions this season are Wycombe Wanderers. Played five, lost five, in the Championship. Another triumph for the points per game calculation.

Wycombe, you may recall, were the grateful beneficiaries of PPG last season.

Catapulted from eighth into the play-offs by virtue of a process that awarded them a predicted 1.73 points per game, including a visit to champions Coventry, who were handed 1.97 points, making it a 3.7 point fixture.

Wycombe progressed through the play-offs, a glorified cup competition with all the attendant unpredictability. Now is the reality. A mid-table League One club were always likely to struggle if plucked and deposited into the Championship.

And that is all PPG became: a random calculation, producing random outcomes,

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Comments

  • Aren't four 'established' teams on 3 points after five games?

  • Anyone who claims 3.7 points were awarded for a fixture is missing a logic circuit in their brain.

    I see he has also provided no alternative solution.

  • "The worst team across the top five divisions this season are Wycombe Wanderers"

    That's patently bollocks. The worst team are Altringham, bottom of the National league, though Southend might be a decent contender for the title.

  • ****The worst team across the top five divisions this season are Wycombe Wanderers"****

    Gareth needs to highlight this comment in his pre-match talk to the team tonight!

  • After 75% of the season was played, we were roughly level with six other teams. Rotherham were marginally ahead, the rest virtually level with us having a fractional advantage. At the end of that season four of those teams were due to enter a "glorified cup competition with all its attendant unpredictability" to determine one team to go up with the second placed team.

    We will never know whether had the last 25% been played, would the same team have occupied second place and the same four teams occupy third to sixth. Sadly extraordinary circumstance got in the way. As it is a small club, more at home oscillating between Lg1 and Lg2 perhaps, earned its place in the Championship on merit.

    We probably will not win many games at that level - maybe none at all - but we earned the right to try and whatever happens this season I remain proud of our team, manager and club.

  • Martin Samuel, just as bad as Adrian Durham. Not one of the teams in the LG1 play-offs last season is actually in the top 7 this season...

    Oxford United who were in 3rd at the time the season finished have 3 points from 5 games and are bottom of the league.
    Portsmouth 4th at the time -10th with 8 points.
    Fleetwood 5th - 14th with 7
    Peterborough 6th - 4th with 12
    Sunderland 7th - 5th with 11

    Furthermore the other two EFL play-off winners are hardly doing well themselves:
    LG2 play-off winners Northampton - 22nd with 4 pts from 5 games
    Championship play-off winners Fulham are bottom - 1 point from 5 games.

    Coventry and Rotherham have 9 points between them out of a possible 30 and are in 17th & 19th.

    Finally, the only play-off winning success story currently is Harrogate who are 7th with 11 points having won their last two games.

    Useless, lazy journalism and just supports the current whiny narrative this nations media seem to love.

  • I know they have to fill column inches but, yawn....
    Can't they find anything original to say.
    I notice that he hasn't thought to point out how unjust PPG was in allowing Oxford a chance to play in the Championship - which they failed to take, by virtue of losing a football match.
    Anyone know how their season is going?

  • @DevC said:
    After 75% of the season was played, we were roughly level with six other teams. Rotherham were marginally ahead, the rest virtually level with us having a fractional advantage. At the end of that season four of those teams were due to enter a "glorified cup competition with all its attendant unpredictability" to determine one team to go up with the second placed team.

    We will never know whether had the last 25% been played, would the same team have occupied second place and the same four teams occupy third to sixth. Sadly extraordinary circumstance got in the way. As it is a small club, more at home oscillating between Lg1 and Lg2 perhaps, earned its place in the Championship on merit.

    We probably will not win many games at that level - maybe none at all - but we earned the right to try and whatever happens this season I remain proud of our team, manager and club.

    You think we might not win any games this season?

  • I will be emailing Martin Samuel to express my disappointment at how such an excellent journalist can ignore the true facts of our promotion.
    You can’t describe a team who led the table for so long, spent more time in the top three than anyone else and had a chance of automatic promotion when the season was suspended as ‘mid table’.

  • Much admiration to those who've tried to respond to the article with fact, logic and reasoning. I can't bring myself to add anything other than to say thanks to Martin Samuel for this seasons motivation.

    The article is moronic and not really worthy of such considered responses as some have given

  • @eric_plant said:

    You think we might not win any games this season?

    My crystal ball is broken Eric. Its possible I suppose although even me as a natural football pessimist would see it as unlikely.

    Bookies seem typically to have us at around a 1 in 7 chance to win each individual match. If that is right 0 wins in 41 is around a 0.2% chance.

    Sporting Index have us getting 31 points this season needing say 7 wins and 10 draws another 24 losses. What do you think. Too high. too low, about right?

  • I think it's stupidity on an enormous scale to suggest we might not win a game this season

  • What an infuriating article.
    Even ignoring all the wilful misrepresentation of the truth to it all, how the hell is 8th midtable?

    However you know you're getting big time when grubby individuals like him are getting on your case.

  • Until we win a game, it remains a possibility albeit an unlikely one.
    Thanks for your useful informative contribution nonetheless.

  • Set him right if you want and can, it doesn't entirely matter. One converted missed penalty in an earlier game would have given us the spot in the table as it stood, it wouldn't have given us a much bigger budget or easier run of games, or persuaded any of the 20 clubs that voted to stop the league from doing so.
    Yes it's crap but papers print worse crap on a daily basis, skewing truth and chearleading their own causes at all of our expense.

    The only way to shut people up is by winning games. Soon hopefully.

  • @glasshalffull said:
    I will be emailing Martin Samuel to express my disappointment at how such an excellent journalist can ignore the true facts of our promotion.
    You can’t describe a team who led the table for so long, spent more time in the top three than anyone else and had a chance of automatic promotion when the season was suspended as ‘mid table’.

    I strongly suspect that he has a rather pally relationship with Barry Fry to be churning that line out repeatedly over the past 6 months.
    In the Facebook group someone made a good point that if we hadn't been on the wrong end of some outrageous decisions from match officials to disallow two equalisers and had the rub of the green against Rotherham, he would haven't have written the same screed about Fulham who are on one point after five games.

  • We were out of the top four once (5th, early in the season) till the very last game.

    Deserving to go up does not mean you will stay up.

    I don't recall anyone wanting to take away Leicester's title because they never cracked the top four again.

  • I would also point out that, strictly speaking, Sheffield Wednesday are ‘worse’ than us as they have minus four points.

  • At least I haven’t had to click on their rotten old website to find out what he’s banging on about.

  • Reads like someone was 100 words short of finishing a column before a massive lunch in the pub. Not sure its worth getting defensive about.

  • @peterparrotface said:
    Reads like someone was 100 words short of finishing a column before a massive lunch in the pub. Not sure its worth getting defensive about.

    It’s the sporting equivalent on a celebrity columnist banging on about cyclists not paying ‘road tax’.

  • @peterparrotface said:
    Reads like someone was 100 words short of finishing a column before a massive lunch in the pub. Not sure its worth getting defensive about.

    More like after a lengthy pub lunch.

  • We are the elephant in the tree

  • This thread lost me at "Daily Mail".

  • We could swap our Samuel for him and stick him in goal. The fat bxstxrd would fill up the entire goal!

  • @LeedsBlue said:
    This thread lost me at "Daily Mail".

    It's not their worst shit take is it. There's whole books dedicated to it.

    Talking of undesirable publication, Sems to be a Sunderland fan or two "giving out some banter" on the Facebook page - Have they no awareness of how they ended up in L1?

  • I look forward to surviving and the mackems missing the L1 playoffs by
    1 goal

  • @glasshalffull said:
    I will be emailing Martin Samuel to express my disappointment at how such an excellent journalist can ignore the true facts of our promotion.
    You can’t describe a team who led the table for so long, spent more time in the top three than anyone else and had a chance of automatic promotion when the season was suspended as ‘mid table’.

    Can you let us know how he responds,please. I was going to email him as he often talks about how great our leagues are for their unpredictability,opportunity for fairy tale endings that can happen. A bit like ours really. He has totally not researched the facts of our 2019/20 season before this nonsensical article.

  • I’d be interested too.

  • I have yet to receive a reply.

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