Buzzin Championship Football

Having won at Wolves last Sunday, Cardiff reached the 70 point mark and are more or less guaranteed a playoff place. I wouldn’t get too excited about that though – this is probably the last weekend where ALL the clubs in the nPower Championship could theoretically reach the playoffs.

However, over the last five years the tables at the end of February have some extremely strong trends that cannot be ignored:

* The club in first place has been always been promoted.

* Second placed teams have been promoted in four of the last five seasons

* No club in either fifth or sixth place at the end of February has been promoted in the last five seasons

* In three of the last five seasons, one club from outside the top six at the end of February has been promoted – all three via the playoffs, but none from outside the top nine

* In four of the last five seasons, all three clubs in the relegation spots have eventually been relegated

Those trends seem to be good news for Cardiff and Watford and bad news for Leicester, Brighton, Wolves, Bristol City and Peterborough. But there’s always more to these facts than meets the eye and it looks very much as if it’s the bottom of the Championship that will be most exciting part of the rest of the season. Here’s why:

* None of the bottom three have earned fewer than 30 points at this stage and all of them are averaging at least one point per game. That’s not necessarily relegation form at this point.

* The four point gap between Peterborough and 21^st place is the narrowest margin since February 2007, when only two of the bottom three clubs at the end of February (Southend and Leeds) were eventually relegated.

* The current bottom three are currently outperforming 13 of the 15 teams that were eventually relegated in the last five seasons.

By the time Easter is over – Good Friday is on March 29th – we’ll have a much better idea about who’ll be playing in the Championship in August 2013, but I’m going to make a bold prediction right now: I think many of the major issues will be settled on the last day of the season.

This weekend’s programme begins tonight when Watford play Wolves (Sky Sports 2, 7:45pm). Quite frankly, Wolves have been dreadful at Molineux since the end of September. One win in 13 games is relegation form – they’re about evens for the drop – and they can’t really expect any mercy from a Hornets team that’s looking for promotion and has only lost one of their last ten road trips. Not only that, Watford have only lost three of their last ten visits to Molineux since the mid 1990s and if Wolves lose again tonight, Bristol City and Peterborough have an extra incentive to do well on Saturday.

Tomorrow there are a couple of ‘top versus bottom’ games to keep an eye on. Neither Ipswich nor Huddersfield will drop into the relegation zone if they lose to either Leicester or Brighton, but the latter pair both need to win to maintain any aspirations regarding automatic promotion.

Leicester’s 3-0 win over Blackburn during the week was their only league victory in February and with what looks like a ‘winner takes all’ game coming up at Cardiff in a couple of weeks time, Nigel Pearson’s side know that any further slip ups will probably mean the playoffs once again. Ipswich have struggled so far in 2013: two wins in nine games isn’t anything to write home about.

Huddersfield kept their first away clean sheet since November when a James Vaughan goal earned all three points at Burnley this week, but they’ve only picked up one point from the five games they have played at the current top six this season. Brighton have only lost once in their last ten home games and look increasingly like the sort of side that could profit from any mistakes made by the other promotion contenders.

The other televised game tomorrow is at Hillsborough (Sky Sports 2, 5:20pm): Sheffield Wednesday are in their best home form of the season (one defeat in the last six games) but they haven’t won consecutive home games since August. Forest ended a seven game winless streak away from home at Charlton last week (Yann Kermogant was sent off), but it’s been nearly a year since they won consecutive away games. A draw is a distinct possibility.

There’s a full programme next Tuesday and so I’ll be back early next week.