Colin Speller attempts to bring some science to the art of speculating about QPR’s diminishing chances of Premier League survival.

We are at the end of the first week of Harry Redknapp’s reign and, sad to say, an air of frustration and perhaps resignation hangs over QPR. Whilst things at Sunderland and against Villa were undoubtedly better, in the end the continued inability of the R’s to achieve any consistent cohesion in the last third of the field cost them four points that were very much there for the taking. Adrift at the foot of the table and seven points from safety, it is difficult not to conclude that all is lost and that we are set for a long hard winter as QPR cement their place in the Championship for next season and potentially in Premier League history for all the wrong reasons.

Sport is full of people presenting the blindingly obvious as some sort of revelation and I remember thinking ‘here we go again’ when listening to Mike Atherton, erstwhile England cricket captain, extolling the virtues of setting milestones within a cricket innings. He was talking about the one-day form of the game at the time but did go on to say that he had always believed it to be vitally important in Test cricket, especially when trying to chase a massive score to win or save a match, and he cited use of such targets in his monumental 185 not out in 643 minutes to salvage a draw in a game against South Africa. His view was that it was vital to have a clear idea of target scores at key stages – lunch, tea, close of play, etc – to include runs and wickets. Without such targets, teams and individual batsmen could lose the plot, with a single wicket prompting panic and a fatal collapse of the innings.

In the marathon innings that is a football season it is indeed very easy to lose the plot. It’s usually October or maybe November when somebody on a QPR message board announces grimly that if we don’t win the next game we are definitely going to get relegated/fail to win promotion (delete as applicable). Whilst this opinion may have some foundation in both history and probability, it’s certainly not and never was a fact that a game lost at this time of the year can be definitively stated to be the moment the key objective was lost. Nevertheless, in a season-long relegation battle most fans will tend to ascribe too great a value to an individual win and too great a sense of disaster to a defeat or even a draw. This roller-coaster sensation is bad for the nerves but, worse still, one or two poor results can build unacceptable pressure on players and supporters to the detriment of the team and its performance.

The other benchmark used by many fans at this time of the year is the performance of rival teams; ‘Oh no, Villa have won and are now N points clear of us’ is the sort of lament you hear. Actually, at this stage it doesn’t really matter – QPR need to chart a way to achieve a target number of points, irrespective of what other teams are doing this week and next. Of course, the standard of the teams in the league will eventually set the cut-off for relegation and it would be wise at this stage to assume that we will need more than the 37 points we achieved last year, but generally at this time of year we expend a disproportionate amount of emotional energy on the results of other teams.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy cautions against the need for a sense of proportion for reasons set out in the sub-section on the Total Perspective Vortex here. But, it also introduces us to the concept of ‘rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty’ and it is to provide boundaries of this type to our wildly fluctuating mood in the coming weeks that I have attempted to combine the wisdom of Mike Atherton and Douglas Adams to bring some science and basic numbers to bear on the challenge of QPR’s Premier League survival. It will probably do little to stop me feeling massively depressed if we lose at Wigan , or completely over-the-top elated if we win, but it may just help us all chart a path to salvation and keep us from losing the plot too soon and too fast if some results don’t always go our way.

All I’ve done in the following table is to set out the games for the rest of the season and give my estimate of a possible points yield from each game that would get us from six points now to 42 points at the completion of the penultimate game of the season. You can argue with the logic of each game, or shudder at the thought that we need to win games away from home, or indeed win games at all. If you are geeky enough to want to play with the information yourself, e-mail me me and I will send you the original spreadsheet and you can enter your own predictions and see if they work.

Apart from showing that there is a plausible path to 42 points the cumulative target allows better or worse than expected results to be put into perspective. For example, I am predicting that we will have 15 points at the end of December and 17 at the end of January. It doesn’t matter if my predictions for the individual games in those months turn out to be right or wrong, if we are at 17 points by the end of January we can be considered to be ‘on track’, more than that and we are ahead of the pace, less than that and we need a new set of targets for the remaining months to reach the objective.

The table also includes a comparison to the results from the equivalent games last year, with me having made random pairings of the promoted teams to the relegated teams for the purposes of the comparison. That shows that we need 11 more points from the coming games than we achieved from the equivalent games last year if we are to reach my target of 42 points, but only six more points if 37 points once again proves to be enough (which I doubt it will to be honest).

Of course, the downside of this is that, very much like a cricket innings, it will allow us to see defeat quite some time before it arrives. But, they say it’s the hope that kills you, so perhaps it will be useful to be able to see when all hope should actually be abandoned rather than continue with false optimism.

Anyway, I hope this gives some reassurance that the task is achievable, brings some light to the debate about our chances and maybe, just maybe, helps keep everyone’s blood pressure down a little in the coming weeks.

* Transfer window open, squad restrictions lifted

Tweet @ColinSpeller, @loftforwords

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daveB added 23:03 - Dec 4 great piece and shows it is achievable but i think we'll have to go some to remain unbeaten until January, i reckon 37 points will be enough this year
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Jigsore added 23:19 - Dec 4 It's the draws that'll kill us. Alternative H wins and A loses like last year sounds good...
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Kaos_Agent added 00:48 - Dec 5 Five losses in the next 23 games. Hmmm. If we can get our "mojo" back your scenario is do-able, but we need a couple of wins for confidence, and we need them in short order.
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Roller added 05:46 - Dec 5 I've started to look at this from an entirely different perspective. Over the weekend we picked up a point more than Reading, Southampton and Sunderland did. If that continues we will be above all of them before the end of January. Focusing on this mystical 40 or 42 points is wrong. I too used the chasing down a big score batting last in a test match analogy. Small achievable targets. What we actually need is to have three teams below us after the last game of the season. So the first target is to pass one team, then another, then another and then stay ahead of them. Our final points total will then look after itself. Let’s not forget that here are still 69 points to fight for. Last season should have taught us that events will not follow any preconception we may make. At some point or other most of us believed that Wigan were relegated, we need to pick up loads of points in the Jan-Mar run of “easier matches” and we had no hope because of the run in from hell. Wrong, wrong and wrong. I will be charting our progress against our points total compared to our immediate rivals rather than an assumed safe total.

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hoops_legend added 08:03 - Dec 5 Great piece.. I will be sending you an e-mail for the spreadsheet and your predictions are realistic enough although think we will lose more than 5 but we may get some additional wins where not expected (we are qpr - we have never and never will do this easy!!!). I'm think we will get 39 points. Roller - your logic def has something to it and is correct but if you are focusing on other teams you a) rely on other teams to mess up and b) you don't concentrate on the game at hand.. Qpr players need to focus on small achievable targest ie. 7 points in each month or something..

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Lewes_r added 09:03 - Dec 5 Great peice.. Wouldnt it be boring if we supported a midtable team like Fulham? As stated above 5 losses is stretching the fabric of time space probability but if we xan get harder to beat then that is the key in my book.. Once you start panicking and saying we need wins not draws then you are finished as that sort of thinking is for winning leagues not staying in them Totally agree with Roller.. Its about passing 3 teams in the coming months rather than an unachievable points total. That means applying pressure on those teams and also worrying about what they are doing... Its going to be nail biting stuff and im already showing an unhealthy interest in Reading Southamprton and Sunderland

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DesertBoot added 09:21 - Dec 5 Good piece though I'd bite your hand off for 42 points. I think we'll beat Wigan but struggle until January thereafter. Simple fact is we are desperately short in attack due to injuries and a ridiculous squad declared by Hughes. I think 35 may be enough this year given the standard in the bottom six. We might just do it.
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QPRski added 12:49 - Dec 5 Colin, thanks for the sensible and factual article which sheds hope on our situation. Your scenario is perfectly feasible. The key is to get the performances which allow to achieve 9 wins. It doesn't sound like much but is a quantum improvement on results to date. Let's hope and pray!
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rrrspricey added 12:51 - Dec 5 But we don't necessarily need 42 points. we just need to be 17th or higher. Lets say our goal this season is a top 6 finish and we were 8 points adrift of that, would you think it was an unassailable gap?...i wouldn't.
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PinnerPaul added 13:02 - Dec 5 Yes very good piece & follows my approach of aiming for 40 pts. 10 wins and 4 draws is how I'm looking at it. I also look at the bookie odds and sadly think they are overstating our chances of survival with odds of 4/6 to be relegated and 6/5 to stay up. I have already had bets at 2/1 and 8/11 for relegation and 11/4 to be bottom but IF we survive losing money will never have been more of a pleasure and surprise!

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TacticalR added 13:23 - Dec 5 Thanks! It's good to take guesswork out of guesswork.
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Jim added 15:16 - Dec 5 I'd like some of what the author's having. So about half the number of matches that have been lost so far will be lost between now and the end of the season. New manager or no new manager the dressing room is still split, the players Hughes brought in are still rubbish and Bobby and AJ are still injured - leaving us with one recognised striker. Has he been reading comics?
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QPRCambs added 15:53 - Dec 5 Jim - I'm not saying that is what will happen, I'm merely pointing out that if we are to survive we need to get 36 (or maybe slightly less) points from somewhere and suggesting how that might be done. I would agree that it is equally possible to contemplate the remaining games and conclude that we are doomed. Incidentally there are rather a lot of draws in my forecast and we could get there with more wins and more defeats. Roller, Lewis, Rrrspricey - the principal contention I am making is that we should not focus on the other teams around us at this point as that will involve much futile emotional energy. I don't know whether we will need 35, 38 or 42 points but the way I would manage expectations now is to set off knowing that we need a certain number of points from somewhere. The danger of focusing on other teams around us at this stage is - IMHO - a risk of too much focus on the result of each game leading to excessive pressure and possible catastrophic loss of morale of players and fans if immediate results don't go our way. I'm not saying that the results of other relegation candidates is not important in the long run and relative results in the final games will, indeed, dictate the outcome. Witness last year when Bolton effectively relegated themselves by failing to beat WBA and Stoke when a win in either game would have killed us. The Atherton philsophy is to break the task into chunks and assess progress against benchmarks and that in essence is what I'm advocating. It's all conjecture of course and just for fun. It was stimulated, though, in part by yet another football expert on the TV who, when asked about QPR's chances, said 'Ooo-er, well, they're a long way behind at the moment...' About as insightful as someone telling me where bears do their business!

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PinnerPaul added 17:05 - Dec 5 Jim, To be fair if after losing to Wolves and Norwich at home last year, someone had said we're going to do this by taking 16 points from Everton, Liverpool, Tottenham, Arsenal, Swansea & Stoke , you could have equally applied your comments to then as well. Wigan HAD to improve last season after losing 8 in a row, very difficult to forsee that they would as well. What the author is trying to do is to offer an alternative to the Private Fraser "We 're doomed" attitude, which allows posters to vent their spleen at Cisse, Hughes, SWP et al for the 123rd time but really doesn't add anything different which this at least does.

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spudoodles added 14:22 - Dec 6 Or we could just try and win every game
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