Pellegrini is obviously right to point out that we're still in fourth and that there are still 24 points to play for. What looks a tall order is getting enough points to beat off the challenge from other clubs, in particular West Ham. We have five away games remaining and three at home and, though many would have seemed a formality even twelve months ago, many now seem tricky to say the least. Since our fifth consecutive victory on September 12 we have played eleven away games and only won eleven points. In these games we have been poor defensively, conceding 14 goals, and our problems in central defence are well documented, but it is up front where we have been even worse, scoring only seven, or half as many as we have let in! We have drawn a blank in six and scored one in three. We scored two in two games but only won that at Watford. One was enough to win at Sunderland. It would seem that we can get no more than five points away from home and, at best, we can only really expect eight. Our home form since September 12 is only twenty five points from fourteem matches, though this is better than our dreadful form away from the Etihad. The worry here is that we have lost all our home games to top six teams and one of our home games is against third placed Arsenal. The other two are West Brom and Stoke. A win against the Baggies might be expected but Stoke made an awful mess of City at their place. It would seem we will harvest between three and six points at home. This would give us between 59 and 65 points for the season and, though West Ham and United have some very tricky games it is far from certain that this would see us home in fourth place. What is even worse is that it seems to be getting worse: in our last four games we have played two teams in the relegation places and only won one, and two teams in the top half, and lost them both. We failed to score against one of the relegation placed teams and both of the top half teams. No part of our team is playing at all well.
