Maths of the Day - August 2017

It's Maths of the Day, in which we use statistics to prove things that are obvious with the false reassurances of numbers. We only look at league games, because cup games skew the stats. So here are the stats up to the MK Dons game, which technically takes us into September, but who's counting?

Five game form

Five game form shows our rolling five game points total, a demonstration of changes in our short term form. With a change of manager and it being so early in the season, everything needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. But what is obviously notable is that the two wins at the start of the season coupled with the three at the end of last means we delivered our first maximum 15 points since before Michael Appleton's arrival in 2014. Obviously, and predictably, that couldn't be sustained with the defeat to Scunthorpe and draws with Shrewsbury and MK Dons. But if you look at our run of form during Michael Appleton's first season and that of most of last season, we are in a very comfortable position.

46 game form

Looking longer term, at a rolling 46 game, whole season, programme. Again, still very early days, but the graph shows that as we should probably have expected, last season saw a gentle but far from concerning slip in terms of the points we'd accumulated by the end of our promotion season. What the little tick at the end of the graph shows, however, is a recovery in the back-end of last year which was sustained for the start of this. 

Run rate

Anyone worrying about our start just has to look at this, we're comfortably ahead of where we were this time last year. Naturally last season Michael Appleton had some capital in his locker and there was the novelty of League 1, so nobody was worrying about the start we made a year ago. Clotet has neither of these, but his opening month, despite all the disruption during the summer and during August he has delivered a very solid start.

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