I simply looked at the head-to-heads of each of our fixtures thus far (including Cup games), the results are below – interesting to know what you make of them:

Wolves (Away) – Won 2-0
Played: 30
Wolves: 14 (46.67%)
West Ham Utd: 10 (33.33%)
Drawn: 6 (20%)

Spurs (Home) – Lost 2-1
Played: 66
West Ham: 28 (42.42%)
Spurs: 21 (31.82%)
Drawn: 17 (25.76%)

Millwall (Home) – Won 3-1 (AET)
Played: 14
West Ham: 7 (50%)
Millwall: 1 (7.14%)
Drawn: 6 (42.86%)

Blackburn (Away) – Drew 0-0
Played: 51
Blackburn: 29 (56.86%)
West Ham: 13 (25.49%)
Drawn: 9 (17.65%)

Wigan (Away) – Lost 1-0
Played: 8
Wigan: 2 (25%)
West Ham: 5 (62.5%)
Drawn: 1 (12.5%)

Liverpool (Home) – Lost 3-2
Played: 58
West Ham: 20 (34.48%)
Liverpool: 21 (36.21%)
Drawn: 17 (29.31%)

Bolton (Away) – Lost 3-1 (AET)
Played: 30
Bolton: 22 (73.33%)
West Ham: 3 (30%)
Drawn: 5 (16.67%)

Man City (Away) – Lost 3-1
Played: 46
Man City: 29 (63.04%)
West Ham: 11 (23.91%)
Drawn: 6 (13.04%)

Fulham (Home) – Drew 2-2
Played: 41
West Ham: 21 (51.22%)
Fulham: 10 (24.39%)
Drawn: 10 (24.39%)

(stats provided by FootballUnited.com)

Having had a good look at those, of couple of results (and past success rates) particularly stood out – Bolton, Blackburn and Fulham. Look how poor our win percentage is against Bolton (and also against Blackburn) – we should stop going to those places expecting them to be opportunities to pick up points because clearly they’re not. Whereas against Fulham (and I know this is a case of stating the bleeding obvious considering how the game panned out) but we can really view that as points lost.

The summation of those above stats equates to the following averages (don’t read too much into these as we’ve not played enough games for them to be entirely statistically significant, but they’re still interesting!):

In the past against all the teams we’ve played so far this year, we would have…

- Lost 40.49% of the games
- Won 37.03% of the games
- Drawn 22.46% of the games

Which, over 9 games works out as:

- 3.64 losses (rounded to 4)
- 3.33 wins (rounded to 3)
- 2.02 draws (rounded to 2)

If you compare that to what we’ve actually achieved this season L: 5 W:2 D:2, it paints a fairly similar picture. In fact, as stupid as it is to say, had we won one more game than we’d lost we’d actually be in a position that statistically we could have expected

(NB – to be taken with a pinch of salt)

Anyway, make of it all as you will – I enjoyed researching for it at the very least!

IRONS

Sam