Martin Samuel in the Mail has done yet another excellent article. He states that it is obvious that the fixtures are not randomly generated by a computer, they are in fact manipulated to suit bt and sky. After all who would want to see City playing the dippers on the final Sunday of the season. What he states is that it is engineered so that the big 6 are not playing each other on the same weekend.
He then asks how Bournemouth ended up with City, Liverpool and Arsenal within the first 4 matches. He does not openly state it is corrupt but mentions the fact that no on really cares if Bournemouth go down so.....
I found it very interesting. If we accept the fixtures are manipulated, then surely we accept they are or at least can be, manipulated to favour a couple of teams. (Cough)
I’ve always been under the impression that fixtures are fixed to a certain extent. They look at all sorts of things to manipulate them but not in a way that should concern anyone.
For example, if the computer threw up all 7 London clubs against non-London clubs at home on the same weekend, they’d change that as the Police wouldn’t want that to happen.
And there’ll be other things that clubs across the league will all agree to when it comes to fixturing.
We’ve arguably had the easiest start to the season of anyone really and I don’t think anyone on here would suggest it’s City who are favoured.
Liverpool have played United away and Everton away (not exactly City and Spurs away but it’s still their two derbies where anything can happen) in their first half a dozen games.
United played Liverpool third game in and play Arsenal tomorrow.
Chelsea v Spurs popped up third game in.
City have played two newly promoted teams, two bottom half teams from last season and West Ham who were the highest placed team from last season we’ve faced so far and they only finished 7th… with no games against a derby rival of any kind… later on we’ve got another bottom half team from last season.
And even in a few weeks when we play Liverpool and Arsenal away in the same week - Phil Foden said of that week we had last season where we played Chelsea Paris and Liverpool away, it was that week that raised our standards and is probably the reason we won the league because we won 15 of our next 17 games off the back of it - those sort of weeks can actually be beneficial.
Are Bournemouth now not in a position where they’re not even in the bottom three and have got three really tough fixtures out of the way and can now concentrate on games where they’re more likely to pick up points?
If you look hard enough, you can attach all sorts of conspiracies to something as big as a 380 match fixture list.
