"In Form Bristol City" (Nov 12 2017)

When driving home last week, I was listening to 5 Live, and at a break between the Roma v Chelsea game the commentator said something along the lines of, “And there’s been another goal at Craven Cottage, which way has it gone?” It then cuts across to the reporter who then says, “it’s another goal for in form Bristol City, 2 nil!”

After the celebratory tap of the steering wheel, I kept thinking, “In form? But in our last three league games, we’ve only won once and that was away at Sunderland; and we were awful against Leeds!”

That has inspired this post. What do we mean by “in form Bristol City?” Is it how we perform over three games? Six games? Ten games? Or even twenty?

To do this, I’ve taken a moving average of the points per game (PPG) of every result since Lee Johnson took charge of City, scaled to the number of points we would get at the end of the season. This is to see at when we have performed best and worst (10 points if you can tell me when that was!) over a given period of time. I’ve taken this moving average from 3 to 46 games, to get a really good spread of “form”.

I’ve made graphs for all of these, that also include:

• Promotion points over the last couple of seasons
• Playoff points over the last couple of seasons
• Relegation points over the last couple of seasons
• Markers for the maximum and minimum numbers of projected points we’ve achieved

Rather than post each individual graph to here and have an overly long thread, I’ve made this gif that cycles through all the graphs, so you can see what happens as you add more games to the moving average.

Along the x-axis is the number of league games we’ve played since LJ took charge. The y-axis shows the projected number of points we’d obtain over the season, if we maintained the points per game from the group of games selected.

• For example: The MA6 graph is a moving average of 6 games. If you get WWWWWW, you average 3 points per game and would get 138 points throughout the season. If you get LLLLLL, you would average 0 and get 0 throughout the season.
• After losing 6 games, you may win, so your form would be LLLLLW, giving you 3 points from 6 games. An average of 0.5 points per game. Having this over the season would mean you would get 23 points - still you would get certain relegation!
• To read these off the graph, find a game number on the x axis. This is the middle game in the set of games if the group is an odd number:
  • Reading game 35 on the MA3 graph gives the average for games 34, 35 and 36
  • Reading game 35 on the MA6 graph gives the average for games 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 and 37.
  • You can scale this up to 46 and this is why the graph shrinks as the MA goes up towards 46. When this season finishes, the MA46 graph would move up to halfway through this season.

All of the graphs are in this album linked below, so you can have a proper look if you want, but the gif I’ve posted shows all of them in increasing order of games. I’ve also stuck all the results onto the end of the album.

https://imgur.com/a/2uuH8

So what should you be looking out for? Some of the key points to notice when looking through them:

• The most obvious thing is that there’s a 20 game period, between 30 and 50 games, that not only includes “the run” but many games either side of it where we weren’t picking up many points, or how long it took for us to get out of the slump.
• After the MA6 graph, the maximum value hugs the right hand side and rarely changes from there, this implies that our best form is most recent.
• You can’t tell form from 3 games, as I tried to when listening to the radio. It changes so much that you can’t build a proper picture from it.
• I like the Gary/Lee Johnson method of look at 10 game blocks. That’s enough time to get a good feel for what’s happening and you can see from the graph that it’s just starting to smooth out - that’s getting rid of the variability that you get from the 3 game moving average.

So to summarise:

Without trying to open a can of worms, the run last season was that bad. However, given LJ has now been in charge for 79 games, a 20 game period of really bad form has in part, overshadowed all the good work either side of it, pretty much until now.

City are now achieving their best results since LJ took charge - that is obvious. Not only over the last 5 or 6 games, but the last 20, 30 and 40 games. Our form in the last 12 games would see us as champions over the last two season and our form in the last 20 games would be enough to get us into the playoff for the last two seasons.

The purpose of this was to take a quick look at our ever changing fortunes since LJ took charge. Hopefully you might look at the blocks of form, the 3-6, game periods that change massively over the course of the season (unless you're at the very top or bottom of the league) and think that it's only when you get towards 10-15 games that you get a real picture of how we're doing. Coincidentally, we're 16 games into the season and looking very, very good. Whilst this doesn't tell us anything new, it reaffirms what we've been thinking about how we're doing this season. I think that "In Form Bristol City" could quite possibly be here to stay for the whole season.