By then the Champions League prospects might be brighter than Jason Tindall’s smile | OneFootball

Here’s a question: how many teams in the Premier League have won more than four of their past six matches?

I would have guessed a couple, maybe three, but a quick check of the table shows the answer is a big fat zero.

Perhaps you knew that all along.

So here’s a trickier challenge: name the four clubs with the joint-best points tally from those six games.

Liverpool, despite their setback at Craven Cottage yesterday, are an obvious choice. Their record of four wins and a draw is matched by Aston Villa, predictably enough. The other two are Crystal Palace and Wolves, standing respectively 11th and 17th in “the world’s greatest league” (copyright Sky Sports, TNT and their acolytes).

One of the best qualities of the EPL is that any team can beat any other team on any given day, with the possible exception of Leicester City and Southampton. They have gathered the not-so-grand total of one point between them in six games while the best have accrued 13 each.

If Newcastle United win at the King Power Stadium this evening we will move up two places in the table to fifth, ahead of Villa and Man City. We will be level on points with Chelsea but behind them on goal difference unless we can register an 8-0 away victory. We’ve done it before, of course, as Sheffield United can testify.

The Mags would still have a game in hand to every team above us in the table. Win that and we would be only one point behind Nottingham Forest and six behind Arsenal with seven matches to play.

Forest have won three of their past six games, Arsenal two. Neither team are in top form. Three points at the King Power would give us four wins from six.

The reason for all this supposition, all these stats, is to show that consistency, something every fan wants from his club, is as invisible as the holy grail. Unless you support the Foxes, whose consistency consists of seven consecutive league defeats. How they must wish for a bit of old-fashioned inconsistency.

The loss of a game here and there does not mean you are a bad team. Players are human and every footballer can have a bad day, especially when the opposition are doing their best to make things difficult. How you react to defeat is more important.

When United rattled off nine successive wins (six in the league, two in the League Cup and one in the FA Cup) this season, the run started with a 4-0 defeat of Leicester at St James’ Park.

If the reverse fixture goes as expected, we will have four on the bounce, including the small matter of a 2-1 victory at a rather big stadium in northwest London on March 16. Funnily enough, I didn’t have to check that date . . .

Our next home game is against Manchester United, formerly a football team, now more reminiscent of a circus. I saw some of the bore draw against their noisy neighbours yesterday. Small wonder the natives are revolting.

To misquote Winston Spencer Churchill: “Never, in the field of football conflict, has so much been owed by so few to so many.” Every match at Old Trafford, that leaky, unclean, dilapidated stadium, seems to be a sell-out. To watch an underperforming bunch of misfits and ne’er do wells who seem to have less spirit than an empty bottle of whisky. I wonder who drank that!

One minute the part-owners say they have had to make canteen staff redundant to avoid running out of money, the next they announce plans for a £2 billion state-of-the-art Wembley of the North. Fittingly enough, the design resembled a ginormous Big Top that would have warmed the cockles of Billy Smart’s heart.

Momentum is probably more important than consistency for a football club. The Salfords have played 31 Premier League games this season without winning two in a row. They are languishing in 13th place, on a negative goal difference, guided by a manager whose record is worse than that of the man he replaced.

I believe we will win at the King Power this evening. I also believe it is likely to prove a tougher assignment than next Sunday’s match, the first of three in seven days.

Come back to me after Newcastle United have played Palace and Villa, those two in-form teams, later this month. By then, the prospect of Champions League football in 2025-26 might be brighter than Jason Tindall’s smile.