Further Evidence of How Good Aston Villa’s Great Escape Was

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Survival Relief

A week’s gone by and there’s still a sense of relief in terms of how the Premier League season ended. The new kit launch this week was certainly the first reminder of what we had survived. Whatever the new home kit was going to look like, at least it was a Premier League kit that Villa were wearing next season.

Some of you will remember a chart we ran a couple of times before lockdown, that plotted exactly what kind of progress Villa were on in terms of a likely points tally needed to survive. We called it the ‘Relegation or Not’ chart, or it’s preferred name, ‘The Rasmussen Diagram’, after its creator Kristoffer Rasmussen.

It had been considered that the survival mark based on recent seasons would have been between 36 to 42 points, so Villa’s process was originally charted against those potential points tallies. Of course, Villa being Villa, managed to miss out on that target, yet still survive.

If you were told at the start of the season Villa would finish on 35 points, you’d have been resigned to relegation, but here we are now on the flipside and somehow they did it.

The Rasmussen Diagram

So in the below diagram, you’ll see Villa’s progress charted against where they should be (Points agg) to be on course to get the 35 points they eventually needed.

The dotted line on the graph is the average they needed to stay on course, the purple line is Villa’s actual progress during the season. So you can see where they went off and on course.

At the beginning of the restart, despite being in the bottom three, Villa were surprisingly all set to reach 35 points and survive. It was the first half of the restart where the team started to potentially head tragically off course, hence why their survival was eventually billed as a ‘Great Escape’.

Earlier in the season, any win seemed to put Villa above the curve. But when you look at the blue bars that indicate Villa winning points, there’s certainly a few worrying lean periods throughout the season.

Anyway, what you have in the chart is Villa’s season at a glance. At the end, we were looking doomed for over a eight game stretch during the restart period. Credit to Dean Smith and the players to show the kind of resolve to keep plugging away and eventually pull survival out of the bag, right at the death.

UTV

Follow Kristoffer Rasmussen on Twitter here @kristoffer2610

Listen to Post-Survival Reflections

7 COMMENTS

  1. Agree= we need to keep the core of the team. Clean out Taylor/ El Ghazi/ Samatta/ Lansbury/ Jotta and go buy Tammy and 2 other prem-players. UTV

  2. Basically it’s only the Villa haters screaming againt the result . From memory the keeper made a clean catch of the ball & was then knocked off his feet by the result of dubious play in the box . . If he had wobbled & fallen into the goal mouth as me & a few Villa fans prayed would happen to Monty the Sunderland keeper when Jimmy Cumbes took a goal kick fom other end & but for the keeper would have scored , that would have been different

  3. lets hear it for hawkeye – missing the fact the ball had crossed the line against sheff utd gave us that precious point The chip in the ball did not work

    hawkeye say in 9000 games it has never not worked before. So its down to the chip in teh ball against Shefffield United.

    trevor fisher

    • Nothing to do with an improved defensive structure to the team and a strong resolve/desire by the players to get us out of our situation in the last four games then???

  4. you can’t say Bournemouth handed it to us on a plate, they went and beat Leicester and Everton (we only had two wins as well from after lockdown.

    Watford went and beat Norwich and Newcastle to be 7 points above us, its not crime to lose to Man city and Away to Arsenal, we always new they had tough games to end.

  5. You say that, but 35 points has kept you up in 5 out of the last 6 seasons. The 42 point mark is a myth, 35/36 is the par score to survive, and you would be ‘unlucky’ to get that amount and go down.

  6. imo. we stopped up because watford and bournemouth handed it to us on a plate,but credit to dean smith staff and players for coming good in the end. this window will tell us alot about what the club is about, i cant wait. keep jack and build with him not around him.

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