First five

Clrnc

Claudius i feel like it's getting worse during and between games. Look at the discussion now about how the title is going to be lost in the first five games of the season.

Feels to me more like how the title is going to be won in difficult games. But in any case it's just simple math. Drop too many points and you don't win the title.

QuincyAbeyie

It's not over-scrutinizing when points matter much more than before - that would be adequately scrutinizing. In the battle for top 4 you can lose tons of points, so every mistake has less weight.

Sicario2 - Tier 1

Claudius

We can prob afford to drop points in no more than 5 games across the season if we really want to win the title.

We can call these games ‘lives’. We really don’t want to be going into the 2nd half of the season where every game is must win like it was last season.

Burnwinter

Sicario2 - Tier 1 We can prob afford to drop points in no more than 5 games across the season

Not to be a dick, but if we lost five games outright and dropped no other points we'd reach 99 points—might not be enough to take the title, but it might be more than enough.

I'd be getting worried if we were far below 45 points after the half season, match day 19 …

Burnwinter

As it's been put, we'll almost certainly win the title if we add the first half of 22–23 to the second half of 23–24. Last season we only scraped 38 points from the first half-season, from memory. It wasn't enough.

And breaking even in our head to heads with City will be massive.

RocktheCasbah

Burnwinter Last season we only scraped 38 points from the first half-season, from memory. It wasn't enough.

40 points, which was actually the same as City!

Dom

Don't want to jinx it but Spurs away should be the easiest game out of this batch.

Its the Spursiest spurs team since Martin Jol days.

Burnwinter

RocktheCasbah I post corrected. 😆

You know what I mean anyway, given the state of the league these days, we'll want to be at around a 90 point pace at the halfway to feel upbeat.

Asterix

Especially as City always come home like a steam train.

Hopefully this season though they will be trying to catch up the 31 points they have been docked...

awooga83

Yeah the trend has been city have been a little less effective in the first half of the season and you need to nail this part and get yourself a decent gap from them. Liverpool in the title they won were just immense in that first half of the season and pretty much killed City with that.

Claudius

awooga83 only practical problem is we and every other team are coming off the first big summer tournament in 3 years. everyone is ramping up slowly. City didn't even bother fielding their two best players from last season in opening week. so this first month will be tricky for all. and probably this whole season.

Sicario2 - Tier 1

Claudius

Or you can argue this is the first summer a lot of players had serious time off. Not all teams progressed far in the euros/copa America. Not all players even played in these competitions.

Players like Odegaard and Haaland had entire summers off.

We need to stop looking at excuses and go full throttle into the season. Ok if other teams have players coming back late then let’s use this to our advantage.

Clrnc

Claudius city rotates very often. It's nothing new. Even in the crucial run ins last year many fringe players started after a UCL match in mid week.

And Pep also use many matches to play academy players every now and then. He can afford to rotate and not drop much points.

flobaba

If we intend to win the league, we better win at least 4 of 5, if not all 5. Worst case we should be aiming for is 4 wins, 1 draw. I bet you this is what Arteta is telling the boys. We know what the standard is, we know what the margins are. No more excuses, valid or otherwise.

Claudius

flobaba these are some of our harder games. We get them out of the way before champions league and games every 3 days start. We don’t really need to win 4 or 5. Don’t fall on our faces, but it’s not a do or die moment.

Clrnc

Claudius it's abit contradictory your last sentence. Obviously people are talking about not dropping too much points here. Lose 3 matches out of this 5 and your chances diminishes dramatically

RocktheCasbah

There's a lot of tolerance between winning 4 out of 5 and losing 3 out of 5 though.

Obviously, to win these away games would be a rocket booster to our start, just as losing them all would put us behind the 8 ball immediately. But drawing at Villa and City, for example, would hardly be a disaster.

Qwiss

RocktheCasbah Exactly. If we can get out of that run having lost 5 points or less it can be considered a good start to the season.

Burnwinter

Sure, it wouldn't be good to drop six points from this lot. But it'd be rash to write the season off if that happened.

Arteta must be walking this tightrope constantly. How do you tell a group of youngish players they've more or less got to be perfect, but also that they've got to keep going when they're imperfect? We face the same issue as fans in a much less intense way.

This early run of matches being tough has its upsides and downsides. Yeah, we might drop a handful of points if we don't show up. But every club's working things out, and we might catch City out before they fully find their groove, for example.

Claudius

Burnwinter has to be painful. And then he turns on the TV to listen to Pep’s platitudes about the threat we pose to his fifth successive league title

Qwiss

Burnwinter Arteta must be walking this tightrope constantly. How do you tell a group of youngish players they've more or less got to be perfect, but also that they've got to keep going when they're imperfect?

Thats just the mentality of a top sportsperson. I watched this a while back and Federer nails the mentality needed to compete at the top. Probably easier for a team to keep this mentality than an individual too.

Burnwinter

Claudius Cute little subplot this season is that we'll be heading to the Etihad right in the thick of their in camera hearing on the 115 charges ... then we'll host them around the same time the judgement's theoretically supposed to be made public.