Fulham, Bournemouth & Forest find early season reasons to be cheerful

Fulham, Bournemouth and Forest have been widely tipped to go straight back down this season, but predicting the future is seldom that easy.

It’s extraordinarily early in the season to be saying something so blasphemous, but it’s probably reasonable to say that some of F365’s pre-season predictions are already looking somewhat shaky. After two games of the Premier League campaign, Liverpool are already four points off Manchester City, while rumours of Chelsea’s imminent decline are already starting to look a little overstated.

But if spinning a coin between Liverpool and Manchester City was always likely to be something of a crapshoot, predicting the relegated teams usually feels a little easier. The financial gulf between the Championship and the Premier League is vast, and no-one on our team went for all three promoted clubs to stay up.

After two games of the new season, one of the more curious trends to have arisen has been that the three newly-promoted clubs have each had some tangible cause for optimism. And that raises the question of whether this year’s Premier League newcomers might be stronger than those of previous years.

For Fulham and Bournemouth, this came on the opening weekend with a draw against Liverpool and convincing win over Aston Villa respectively.

Nottingham Forest’s performance at Newcastle might have given their supporters a little cause for concern, but their bounce back against West Ham was similarly impressive, if reliant on a little good luck.

After six games between them, the newly-promoted clubs have won two, drawn two and lost two. Four of their opponents – Liverpool, Wolves, Manchester City and West Ham – finished in the top half last season, with Aston Villa and Newcastle hardly gimmes.

So, what does this all *mean*? Well, it’s possible that it means very little. This year’s newly-promoted teams are only two points better off than last season’s – Norwich, Watford and Brentford picked up a win, two draws and three defeats from their first two games – and so we’re into the realms of inferring too much from too small a statistical sample.

And that’s an entirely fair criticism. No-one, for example, expects Manchester United to still be bottom of the Premier League come next May. Okay, maybe that’s a bad example, but the fact remains that paying too much heed to results (or certainly league tables) in August is something of a fool’s errand. After all, only one of the three teams in the…