With the Champions League causing yet another break in any interesting Premiership action, Effra took the extra time to put a little more analysis around the not-quite-as-inevitable fate of West Ham.
Well what I thought was a two-week sojourn into the fantasy land of hope still has me in its grip. West Ham are still going down I tell myself but I am not sure that I quite believe any longer that this hope trip is nothing more than a temporarily absorbing distraction. This weekend I seriously acquainted myself with the Premiership predictor on the BBC site in which you can come up with a hundred different ways in which West Ham are staying up. I even got us in the top half of the table with one set of results. Certainly scrapping off terrible refereeing decisions and other teams’ rubbish performances might not seem like the basis for survival but getting by on the dregs can do strange things to an already deluded mind.
From my new perch beyond reality, the other teams in the relegation struggle should take note of the following:
1. Sure West Ham have to play Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United but 6 of our 26 points this season have come against these clubs.
2. West Ham were the last away team to win at Highbury so symmetry demands that they are the first to win at the Emirates
3. By the time Chelsea get to Upton Park, they will be in the middle of a fixture pile up, and it took them more than 90 minutes on Saturday to score against Watford.
4. Neil Warnock’s bravado is very unconvincing especially since his top scorer won’t play again this season.
5. Wigan are having no luck at the moment, and have Emile Heskey to score goals for them.
6. Aston Villa’s only win since 20 January was against us in the utter depth of our ineptitude when Curbishley still thought that Roy Carroll was a better goalkeeper than Rob Green.
7. Fulham have won once in the Premiership since 18 December, and they can’t play Newcastle again.
8. Newcastle haven’t scored in the Premiership since 10 February, and Glen Roeder is a crap manager who doesn’t seem to have noticed that they are only 6 points off the drop-zone with 21 left to play for, a fact which is not lost on their rather more mentally robust fans.
9. Charlton are staying up, and this is the point where I keep getting very stuck and will mean that when it is all over we will not be spared remembering every lurid detail about what happened to us this season.