So, ol’ Pards has been sacked by Palace, eh? Normally this kind of news wouldn’t be drawing too much attention from your humble narrator here, but given who’s been linked with a move to Palace as his replacement, I’ll admit to it averting my attention.

If Allardyce gets the job, it means We’ll have Pulis and him as visiting managers within a week. It’s like the second coming of the anti-Christ or something.

The anti-Christmas.

Still, at least it’ll be some football to take the admittedly still sour taste in my mouth, lingering from last weekend. I guess the reason I’m still harping on about it is because it feels like a bit of a watershed moment in our dreams of the title. I don’t want to sound too melodramatic – because obviously there’s loads more football to be played – but it kinda felt like the day the music died kinda stuff, y’know? It sort of feels like we’ve finally had the veil lifted and we can see how far off this team is from winning the title. Especially as a couple of weeks ago we saw Chelski execute a perfect counter-punching performance against City. Yet we couldn’t. We did what we always do and, well, just crumbled away from home to a top six side.

But it’s not just away from home that we’re faltering, is it? I mean, we’ve now played all of the teams who finished as last season’s top six yet that Chelski result aside, we haven’t exactly performed superbly. 

We lost 4-3 to a Liverpool side that worked harder than us.

We drew 0-0 to a Leicester side who have gone on to struggle all season.

We drew 1-1 at home to The Totts and looked incredibly passive at times.

We drew 1-1 away at Old Trafford and consider ourselves extremely lucky that the curse of Mourinho didn’t strike again.

We lost 2-1 against City last weekend.

It hardly makes for amazing reading, does it?

But here’s the thing: I suspect that a couple of wins over Christmas could really make the difference. It doesn’t matter how we get them, we need to pick up six points and if we do we hit the 40 point mark at the halfway stage. Teams are going to drop points against each other and so that total at the halfway stage won’t be too bad a return. Given that my confidence has been dented somewhat, I won’t say it still gives us a chance of winning the league, but I always think that if you get yourself to 80 points you’ve done well and if somebody else notches more then so be it. We haven’t hit 80 since 2005 and that year we finished just behind United. The league wasn’t as competitive in those days and so I’d be surprised if anyone hit more than 85 points these days. Last season Leicester won the league on 81.

So what I think we need to do now is to start breaking the season down into little chunks. Start seeing it as little milestones. The first one takes us up to the FA Cup against Preston. If we go in to that game having picked up nine points, we hit the milestone and can look to the Chelski game at the beginning of February as the next milestone to aim for.

I think I’ve cheered myself up a bit in the space of writing this blog. Lovely. 

Catch you tomorrow.