I don’t want to get too carried away but we should know more about our chances with the title over the course of the next 7 days. Our job is fairly simple in that we have an away game on boxing day at the KC stadium against Hull and then we face Wigan at home 4 days later. As far as I can see it we need to wrestle 6 points out of those 2 games and hope that others slip up. Keeping our end of the bargain is going to be tough but should be manageable providing sir Alex has bollocked the team into some sort of action. Nobody really knows what the defence is going to look like but Vidic should start at Hull, Neville and Brown are not far off at all and the Da Silva twins are good to go as well so we should be able to fashion something that at least looks like a defence now. Chelsea in the same period have very tricky games with a trip to in form Birmingham and a home tie against their west London rivals Fulham. If we can somehow manage to keep our end of the deal and get 6 points from the 2 games I really can’t see them getting more than 4 given that they are not exactly in flying form themselves and that would leave us a very manageable 2 points behind going in to the new year and with all their players heading off to the African Nation’s Cup we could just be laughing. The one thing that I would say is don’t rule out Arsenal in all of this as they have been sneaking up for a while now and although their squad is probably too light weight to win the title they could be trouble for some of the big teams.
Doomsday Scenario
The ideal picture above is of course painted based on us winning our next two games with for anybody who saw the game against Fulham is very far from certain. The good news is that we have had a week to get over it at this stage but we are going to have to start playing as a team and getting a steady run from some of our players especially at the back. The biggest hope is that we can get Fletcher back in the middle of the park because he was having one of his best seasons ever until he was drafted in to the back line. We don’t just need to worry about Chelsea because with both of the top 2 on a bad run of form the other teams have caught up with us and the winner of the Villa Arsenal game at the weekend will actually go ahead of us in to 2nd for a while. Worst case scenario is we get turned over by Hull and Chelsea win which leaves us in 3rd place 7 points behind the leaders which at that stage you would think that would be curtains for our title aspirations. You can see why I think it is such a big week for us.
Hull Away
In Fairness you would expect us to deal with Hull fairly easily as both Aston Villa and Arsenal have both done 3-0 recently and they are not on a great run but if they do have a chance of beating you anywhere it is at home where they pick up a lot of their points. Truth is though they are very strong candidates for relegation and we should be able to turn them over if we have any serious hopes of winning the title.
