City and United pull clear at the top — and Everton really are now showing relegation form

This weekend’s Premier League results saw Man U beat Spurs, which puts United firmly back in 2nd spot in the alt-3 league table.

Spurs, who had been ranked just ahead of United coming into this weekend’s fixtures, drop to 4th place, just behind Chelsea. Although Chelsea have one point less in the bag than Spurs do, Chelsea have played tougher fixtures so far than Spurs — which is reflected in the difference between their schedule-strength figures in the alt-3 table.

Everton: Should Koeman really have been sacked?

I commented last week on Everton’s rather misleading position in the standard league table. They were ‘languishing in the bottom three’ in the words of one national newspaper. In the fairer alt-3 table, though, last week Everton were actually in 12th position, not 18th — the reason being that Everton had faced an unusually hard fixture list in the first 9 matches of this season.

Everton have since sacked their manager, Ronald Koeman. And today they lost again, at Leicester. For the first time this season, even the alt-3 table now puts Everton in the bottom 5 in the table: their strongly positive schedule-strength rating (currently at +2.1) is not enough to place them in mid-table any longer.

It is hard to know, of course, exactly why Everton sacked Koeman. But if it was related to those ‘bottom three’ headlines, then it might reasonably be argued that the club should have held their nerve. Certainly Koeman’s dismissal does not seem to have helped Everton in the short term!