**Newcastle United's Premier League form has been, on the whole, pretty poor this season if we're being polite about things.**
Our home form stops that rating from being 'utterly horrific', but our away form has been nothing short of abysmal.
However, we have seen this all before. There's always a spell in every season that we lose our way; we're just getting it out of the way early this time.
Eddie Howe has guided us out of worse runs of form, and when that happens, we tend to go on a winning streak, so we're not throwing in the towel by any means.
Would finishing out of Europe with a cup win be good enough?
ESPN have predicted the Premier League final standings after 10 games
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We absolutely back Eddie Howe to get us back into the top half of the league, and so too does ESPN, whose Ryan O'Hanlon has used the following method to determine how the final league table will look.
> "Rather than doing a much more complex and perhaps much more mathematically sound projection, this approach will be something simpler: (1) because it's easier to understand, and (2) because that makes it easier to glean insights from what the projection tells us."I've written about this so many times that I fear I will soon develop a very specific kind of hand arthritis from the repeated motion of my fingers toward these letters, but my favorite single-number to project future team performance is what I call "adjusted goal differential." This comes from a study by former AC Milan data researcher Ben Torvaney, which discovered that a blend of 70% expected goals and 30% actual goals better predicted future point totals than either goals or xG alone or any other blend of the two.
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> "Knowing that, I then looked at the relationship between a team's adjusted goal differential after 10 games and their points won over the final 28 matches. Based on data from the past 10 Premier League seasons, a team with a neutral adjusted goal differential after 10 matches would be expected to win 1.39 points per game for the rest of the season. And then every goal increase of adjusted goal differential increases the point per game expectation by 0.47 points."
ESPN predict a top-half finish for Newcastle United
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With that methodology applied, ESPN has Newcastle United just breaking into the top half of the table with a 10th-place finish.
> "Put another one in the "just make Newcastle have the ball and you'll win" basket after Sunday's lopsided 3-1 loss to West Ham when Eddie Howe's team had 62% of the ball:"Coming into this weekend, Newcastle would've been my pick for "best team after the top four" from now until the end of the season -- and they still might be. But, come on: this is West Ham, you guys! You're in the Champions League! They're old and bad!
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> "Although 10th _feels_ really low, the gap between Newcastle's projection and Tottenham's projection is smaller than the gap between Tottenham's and Chelsea.
Would you be happy with a 10th place finish this season?
* After this start? Sure. Just happy we're not going down.
* If we won a trophy and finished 10th I could live with it.
Would we take a 10th-place finish given this start to the season?
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At this point in time, with that crushing defeat still all too fresh in my mind, I'd take 10th spot on the condition that we retain the Carabao Cup. Obviously, it means missing out on the Champions League next season, but is that once again a huge part of the problem?
That would, of course, make recruitment all the more difficult in the summer, as that whole needing top players to get in the Champions League but not having Champions League football to offer the top players thing comes in again.
Finishing 10th would probably be seen as a massive underachievement and might actually put Eddie Howe's job in jeopardy, unless he brings silverware along with it.
On the positive side, that ESPN prediction method has us finishing above Sunderland, who they project to finish 11th.