With five league games gone, I’m afraid it’s time for the return of This Season vs Last Season – lucky number 13. The series was born during the 2009/10 season as dissenting voices towards Martin O’Neill’s stewardship grew louder and louder. Lots of comparisons were made to how many points we had at the same stage of the previous season, but comparing the fixtures on a like-for-like, or apples-to-apples, basis revealed that we were often doing better than the previous season despite how it seemed chronologically.

The series became largely superfluous last season as it really didn’t matter how you sliced or diced it, we were clearly doing worse than the previous season. A lot worse. In fact, as the season wore on, it became more of an analysis of how we were (just about) remaining on course for the theoretical safety threshold of 40 points. Sad, but true.

We talked about 40 points probably not being enough and also needing to hit 42 or 43 points by the 36th game as the final two games against Arsenal and Liverpool were unlikely to yield much. As it happened, the 1-1 draw against Wigan took us to 42 points, but the final two games unexpectedly provided six more points which left us with 48 points from 38 games and a very welcome 9th place. It also just happened to be the case that Wolves survived the drop in 17th place with the magical 40 points.

At this stage of the season, I’m not going to be utilising that outlook just yet and I hope it remains unnecessary for the remainder of the season, but it was interesting to hear Gabby Agbonlahor recently elaborating (5:12 in that video) on a desire to improve on last season by setting the first waypoint of 40 points and then “pushing on from there” to “hopefully finish in the top half”.

I don’t think that’s too defeatist, doing better than last season has to be the first target realistically. The 48 points we finished with was the poorest return since O’Leary’s final season; 2005/06’s 42 points.

I know a lot of fans will question whether it’s possible to improve on last season’s performance with a squad which is arguably weaker, but 48 points is not a fair reflection last season’s squad, they were better than that. In fact, as many people pointed out, it was largely the same squad that had finished 6th with 64 points the season before.

Did the 2009/10 Aston Villa overperform? Did the 2010/11 Aston Villa underperform? You can argue about that forever and a day, but I see enough quality in this season’s squad to do better than 48 points, so how are they doing so far?

Glad you asked, here’s the table you should be familiar with which shows last season at the same stage (Chron) and matching the results from identical fixtures (Apples):

Of course, it’s early days, but the zero losses stand out. Turning at least one of those four draws into a win would have been really useful, but we have the same seven points that we did at this same stage last year and are just a point worse off than we were when comparing the same fixtures.

The next game is against QPR and as a promoted team they are mapped against one of the relegated teams from last year. I’ve matched the highest placed from each league against each other as follows:

• QPR = Birmingham
• Norwich = Blackpool
• Swansea = West Ham

There could be some discussion about whether those are the best matches, but it’s not entirely subjective and we’re only talking about six of 38 fixtures; it’s good enough for our purposes.

Projections

Extrapolating our final performance from just five games, especially given the opponents, is an exercise in futility. However, I have the data readily to hand so I’m including it on a “just for fun” basis at this stage. So, if we managed to maintain our current rate of 1.40 points per game, we’d finish the season with around 53 points which is usually good enough for the top half.

I stress though, the value of projections based on just five games is extremely low.

Out record last season for the next five games on an apples-to-apples basis was DDLWL; five points, with four goals scored and eight conceded. The last few games might not have been too inspiring, but I sincerely hope that we can do better from the next five games and I can report back with a rosier picture at the 10 game mark.

To be perfectly honest, if I’m not returning with better looking numbers in five games time… well… it’s going to be messy, isn’t it?