Dan

Pochettino is a busted flush. You could forgive some of this if it looked like there were building blocks being put in place for the future but he plays a 40 year old defender, and they can't defend. Absolute shitshow.

Has the standard of goalkeepers ever been lower? Seems a very simplistic take from the number of goals but there really is some dog shit about, even at supposedly good teams. Arsenal have two very hit and miss goalkeepers, Chelsea's is bang average, even Ederson is a meh shot stopper.

I'm picking defenders almost entirely on attacking output at this point. There must be something like 3 clean sheets a weekend on average and they seem almost totally random. This is surely the highest scoring Premier League ever so far.

Ah honestly. I can't even claim to be unlucky in general it just seems to be in here. I've kept a record of every single selection I've made this season with a £10 stake and I'd be over £300 up with singles. I'm just consistently picking the wrong ones to stick in here. I had Wolves & Auxerre wins with over 1.5 goals tonight. I need St Gallen to do the same for a win tomorrow (their game at the weekend was moved to Wednesday). 1 win in 19. I mean bloody hell. I should be averaging 18/1 odds with that record and yet here we are.

Ah my god, I am genuinely cursed. I've never known anything like it.

I don't disagree with this, I tend to find the results are a bit harder to predict. Early signs here are that I've fumbled it yet again. Well well well, 1-0

I'm doing it again unfortunately. I'm going to take Wolves win and over 1.5 goals as an early pick for my double @ 13/10 - think that's very kind, Burnley haven't fooled me by beating a dreadful Sheffield United. Wolves for me are the better team and what seems to have a bit under the radar under O'Neil is that they seem to be a quite high goals team at both ends, with only one clean sheet, and one failure to score all season - both in August, and both of them frankly a bit of a freak. Burnley have conceded 3 2 3 1 2 1 in their away games. I concede the chances of 1-0 here are probably higher than most of their games, but I think you can justify getting on them here.

WEEK 18 - CREEPING BACK UP, CREEPING BACK DOWN WEEK 18 STATS Winning bets: 3/8 Winning selections: 8/16 Weekly forum position: +£10.27 (Ranked 6/18) --- OVERALL STATS Winning bets: 35/130 Winning selections: 117/248 Total forum position: -£241.48 A mixed week but some of this is on myself as I have made a bit of discovery, and not a good one either. I have made a couple of errors in the table over the season and have identified that I did not account for two people's losses earlier in the season. Read on, and hope that it isn't you! Better late than never. Well, unfortunately, not really the case for @Pyfish who delivers a last minute loss as Atalanta can't score at Torino. Always infuriating when you have a both teams to score pick where the underdog score fairly early but it loses. Torino ran out surprise 3-0 winners. AFC Wimbledon won 5-0, a pretty routine win. @Machado's habit of aiming for the utterly bizarre took us to Cyprus and Africa this week where we had two games with a heavy favourite being tipped to have their attack blunted somewhat. Sadly it backfired badly, as APOEL won 5-0 and Zamalek won 0-4. Two losses for the first time all season for him. @RandoEFC makes it four consecutive weeks of a half win, as while Braga delivered a 3-1 win to pay out, Cherno More Varna could only win 1-2, although they conceded a late goal themselves in that game so it was very nearly a first loss in a while. That's 7 wins in 9 weeks - although I think he'd have wanted more than £28.54 profit over that period considering. @Stan comes back with a winner for the first time in a month. Bolton sticking 5 past Harrogate in the FA Cup, but in a perfect twist getting the absolute dream scenario where he manages to see Leicester throw a point away very late on to win his bet, and then steal the win even later on anyway. So a win-win from a very unlikely scenario. Unfortunately, we come to our double-loser of the week. Many apologies to @CaaC (John) who not only loses his bet, extremely narrowly too after Everton won and Manchester United did come extremely close to a late equaliser, but is docked a further £10 entirely due to my own error in not knocking off week 11's loss. To make matters worse, the table has gotten very tight this week and this has knocked him all the way down to 6th. I apologise! The other victim here is @...Dan - who I forgot to dock the £10 of for week 15, so unfortunately his win, which is the result of the week in this table, is blunted somewhat. He does still even despite the deduction manage to have the best outcome of the week, his second win in a row and has put @Lucas into the bottom two, after he landed neither of Leverkusen or Man City's wins, quite unlucky too frankly looking at how the games went. Dan go a week without a late cry over the bad luck challenge. This week though, they can get absolutely fucked. I went early in my double and paid the price as Shakhtar could only manage the 1 goal over Antwerp. They hit the post on numerous occasions and even managed to round the keeper and miss. In even more annoying news, Plymouth got a last gasp winner, so I would've landed a very nice win this week, but it's not to be, and I'm absolutely cut adrift at this point. I need a good win again soon. Lots of football on this week. Do your worst. As stated, I'm thinking everybody gets a £25 bet to use one week from Christmas too, which should make it interesting, almost like a triple captain in FPL.

£25 a figure I had in mind. No obligation to use it and no specific week it has to be used in.

Now when it comes to Christmas presents traditionally we'll have surprises, however given that there may be those who think this isn't a good idea for the game, happy to hear what you think. For a tipping game christmas present, I'm thinking to allocate everybody a week where they get a boosted stake, to be used whenever they fancy.

Was about to complain that I have already done the table ready to post later but then remembered you're top regardless

England will win that group. England generally get exactly those sorts of fixtures sorted. It's taking on the bigger teams and names that proves the stumbling block.

Not been able to log in this weekend so far for some reason. First thing's first, I'd happily just play at The Hawthorns every week. It delivers every single time without fail. That's our sixth win there in a row, and probably our most dramatic since 2015. I thought it was a pretty bad game on the whole, it went for a large part as I thought it would with two fairly cagey sides, but it did spring into life after we scored. A third straight away game where we've conceded a decisive late goal although this time it did turn out not to be as for some reason they sent everybody up at a throw in. They had too many attacking heads on the pitch and they paid the price. I think it's a good example of why we will go up. We weren't great and I continue to think we're playing within ourselves, but we've got the win yet again in what is a hard fixture for this level. We needed that lift after Wednesday - albeit I still think the performances could show a bit more. That winner at the end is the sort of thing you go for though. Magical.

With around 5 left of our game you got the absolute dream scenario

How do you have one win and one push every single time without fail. It's mental. Looks like a good week in here. I'm getting cut adrift now.

The same bloke who had Cheltenham to nil last week went for QPR -1 tonight. Unreal work.

We've still not let in two in a league game this season which is really impressive, but I do think that is going to fall soon, quite possibly tomorrow as well. We don't look quite as tight. Faes doubtful as well which doesn't help at all, not been convinced by Coady.

If I was going to have a second this weekend I would've gone for Plymouth beating Stoke. Just bonkers how they can be the underdogs. 16 home points to Stoke's 8 away points. Plymouth basically got promoted, and are likely to survive on their home form. I think a decent long shot is Plymouth -1 as well, as every Plymouth win has been by 2 or more goals, and Stoke have lost six games by 2+ goals. Not a banker by any means but definitely value for me.

I know it sounds sacrilegious to say it but Vardy cannot start games anymore. Even against the weaker sides he's just a complete passenger. The problem is Iheanacho isn't playing any better either, Cannon is totally untested for us (wrongly I'd say at this point) and he clearly isn't having Daka. It is genuinely hard to know who to start up front. I think he wants a false nine type of player. Well despite improving technically over the years Vardy will never be effective playing that way and Iheanacho is so inconsistent on his own too, it's a bit of a problem. Vardy in theory should be a great sub to bring on. I've been banging the Vardy sub drum for well over a year now. I think the last two games totally vindicates this.

If this is what happened the other night I'd hold no concerns really, for me that's just the peaks and troughs of football and it can happen. If we batter a side and don't win, it's very annoying, but there isn't a long term concern. But that performance was abject. Sheffield Wednesday had the better chances most of the game. This is a side on six points all season. They should probably take some encouragement and I think there's a chance they do have a bit of an upturn (it's admittedly going to be hard to be as bad as to keep getting 0.35 points a game) but for the unquestionable gulf in quality between the two teams that was a seriously dire showing and the trend in our performances is a red flag to me. I think teams have worked out a bit how to stop us but he doesn't really appear to be reacting to that. I think our quality will see us through but for the first time since probably the Coventry game I've started to have doubts about if we'll do this. As I've stated elsewhere I think the points threshold is looking likely to be an alltime high this season. You genuinely could come 3rd with 95 points. Ipswich have been remarkable and Leeds / Southampton have really picked up after iffy starts. It's very competitive at the top this season and we're playing the worst stuff of the top four for me currently. In-fact we have the worst form of the top eight. I knew there'd be bumps but I think we have too big a tendency to keep things tighter than we need to. We can usually be relied upon to punish a team late on as our style of play does wear down the opposition, but I still think we're making things more complicated at times than we need to. We don't need to play stealth-ball against a side like Wednesday. They were so clearly lacking in confidence and quality and I think our passivity has let them off the hook. I wouldn't mind if it was a one off, but we've been making hard work of a lot of these games all season. I think we overcomplicate things.

We usually always win here but I feel like we're heading for trouble this time. They're on the up and we're playing badly. 1-0 loss.

We really are unconvincing. I've been giving us a lot of the benefit of the doubt but I am starting to think that we don't really have the gears to go through and that this side that unnecessarily keeps games tighter than they need to is what we are. I think we've been running pretty hot for points and it's starting to catch up with us. Bar the run between the September and October international breaks I've found us quite underwhelming, even despite the points tally. We badly need a reaction. I can't believe we've just served that up against a side so blatantly not cut out for this level. Absolutely revolting, if we have a result as bad as that again this season I'll be mortified.