Nick Goff
Everyone looks forward to week one of the football season. But ever the contrarian, I look forward to week two more. In week one, we see one team dominate another and we’re left wondering whether that happened because one of the teams is very good, the other is very bad, or a bit of both. In week two we get some new information which helps us answer those questions.
Like a jigsaw, we start fitting pieces together to figure out what makes sense, and the next week we get a little more, until by weeks 6-8 we can start gathering enough evidence to rank the teams in each league with a decent level of confidence.
So where we are today, we can’t do that yet. Two games definitely aren’t enough to throw all our pre-season opinions out of the window and go with what we’ve seen on the pitch. At this point, we need an amalgamation of pre-season views and two games of evidence. Next week we can remove another layer of pre-season opinion and replace it with week three data. That might cause us to change some opinions, but that’s okay.
Today I want to focus on the upper echelons of each league. I feel it’s a touch easier to get a handle on who’s good after two games than who’s bad, so I’ll leave relegation markets for now and perhaps return to them next month.