Never tell me the odds: Rating Leicester City’s prospects on the final day
Leicester have a 17.4% chance to stay in the Premier League, according to the Opta supercomputer. But what do the laptop boffins know? How do the fans on the ground feel about our prospects for survival?
I'm at about 1% chance of survival. I've been so sure we'd be relegated for months that I'm resigned to it. But I'm open to a miracle, we've certainly defied odds before.
The main reason for the low expectation is that we need to win. For weeks now people have been telling me we will stay up because 'we only need 2/3 more wins out of the remaining however many games', but the reality is we've won 8 of them all season and only 3 since November 12th.
The stats say a lot, but the feeling and what we've been watching say more. In the 2014/15 great escape season, stats were against us, but there was still a good energy around. The players looked like they cared, everyone was aligned, there's nothing of that this year.
I'm weirdly confident Everton will falter, but I'm really not convinced we will complete our side of the bargain. Maybe our recent record of needing a result on the last day but imploding has something to do with it!
When Smith and co. came in, I said Vardy to score 5 in the remaining 10 to save our season; with 2 down, a hat-trick on Sunday would be very welcome. There's a chance, I'm not expecting it, but I'd love Vardy to finish his story the right way.
Becky Taylor
I find it very hard to believe that Everton are going to drop points in their game. They’re like a poisonous Premier League stink you can’t get rid of, they’ve been winning on the final day to stay up longer than most of us have been alive.
This is also a terrible set up for us. Not only do we need to win, which we never do, we need to score early to put the pressure on and hold our nerve under the pump. Against a West Ham team that used to batter us even when we were good.
If the task was to concede early from a ball smashed over the top of our defence then miss a late penalty to save ourselves, I’d be 100% confident.
As it is, I’m probably hovering around the 5% mark, because there has to be a timeline where this works out. But it probably isn’t this one.
James Knight
If you're going with pure numbers, 20% probably seems about right. If you played this scenario out five times, I'm sure one of them would result in a win for us and Bournemouth being too good for Everton despite the disparity in the importance of the match for both teams.
Emotionally, we've been drained of hope and optimism for so long - the most-used phrase recently has been death of a thousand cuts - that I haven't got much left for the final day. I actually enjoyed the Newcastle game in a masochistic way. It made me laugh more than anything. Perhaps that says everything about my mindset now. Just when we should be gearing up for a huge game, I definitely feel like the season ended with the Fulham game and this is some kind of weird post-season just to give us an extra kick in the Bertrands.
One important thing is that we need to win to give ourselves a chance regardless of what's happening at Goodison Park so, while the fans will be trying to keep up to date with events there, it's vital that any reaction doesn't affect the players.
Of course, it's a minor problem that we haven't looked like beating anyone much for months and have wilted most spectacularly when the pressure's been on. I think most people are clinging onto the hope that this is the exception that proves the rule. So emotionally, the percentage is more like a drained phone battery where everything's started to take ages to load and you're just waiting for it to switch off.
Happy days!
David Bevan
I have more faith in Bournemouth doing what we need them to do than us beating West Ham, and that says it all in truth. West Ham will want to have some positive momentum going into the Europa Conference League Final, and I doubt they'll make wholesale changes for risk of Moyes being accused of harming the integrity of the Premier League.
Monday night proved that Smith has finally come to terms with the limitations of this squad, and his tactics on Sunday will now have to shift dramatically to a system which should give us something that resembles a game of football. Our fate not being in our hands does take pressure off to a degree, but the tension and expectation in the crowd will weigh heavily on the players.
Despite my pessimism, I keep playing out joyful scenarios where we score early, Everton sh*t the bed, we coast to victory, and all is forgiven for this car crash of a season (I joke, heads should absolutely roll). I will sit firmly on the fence and agree that the supercomputers have it about right.
Matt Jedruch
It's possible. Certainly more possible than I thought it would be before last weekend’s games as I thought both Leeds and Everton would win and we'd be relegated already.
There's been a weird forcefield around Everton that, despite a number of seasons like the one we've had this year, they just don't get relegated. That said, I do think Bournemouth may prevent them winning... but can we rely on 22/23 Leicester City winning? That's the thing that's keeping me awake at night.
We need get ahead early (those were the days) and make Everton jittery. Keep the ultimate outcome in doubt right until the end to put all the pressure on Everton.
It's unlikely, but not impossible.
Iain Wright
