Unfortunately, it’s time to review this season’s performance against last season and it’s pretty grim. Last year I apparently ran the numbers after 14 games so that I could arrive neatly at 19, the half way mark, but I think I’ll stick with every five games for the rest of this season.

I won’t waste your time with narrative, the numbers speak for themselves. What I will add is that in games 16 – 20 last season we went to Old Trafford and won, then to the Stadium of Light where we took another three points before beating Stoke at Villa Park. That was followed by a bad loss at the Emirates thanks to Cesc Fabregas and among the doom and gloom that followed, Liverpool practically mugged us for the points at Villa Park. Still, it was nine points from five fixtures everyone should have been reasonably pleased with and most were.

On an apples for apples basis though, with Hull as the substitute for West Brom, we did slightly better with 10 points coming from a 3-1 victory at Anfield, a 3-0 victory over Hull at Villa Park and a 2-1 victory at Wigan. The 1-1 home draw against Tottenham disappointed many and the 3-1 loss at Eastlands finally killed off all hopes of a top four finish, but who wouldn’t be happy with 10 points from those five fixtures this season?

That’s for the future, here’s the present situation:

To add some perspective, Man City currently occupy 4th place with 26 points from 15 games scoring just 20 goals and conceding 12.

Continuing at this same pace will lead to finishing with 43 points.  The best that’s yielded in a 38 games season is 12th, the worst was 15th.

You can all read the Premier League table as well as I can, a run of decent results can do wonders for our position, but it’s hard to see where that run is going to come from. Our poor luck with injuries can’t continue forever and there could be some new faces in January, but we’re still going to need a stellar run at some point to achieve something respectable with this season.

After tomorrow’s Carling Cup tie at St Andrews, a game a lot of fans are attaching major hopes and significance to, we go to Anfield. Liverpool are hugely unpredictable right now. They looked bright for a long time at White Hart Lane this past weekend, before returning to looking like the team we’ll want to play against.

They have a Europa League trip to Romania to contend with. Hopefully we’ll have have all of the confidence from a Carling Cup semi-final berth booked and without the need to even leave the area code.