If My Grandmother Had Wheels: Four Alternative League Tables

One for the Part-Timers League

My final fun league for 22/23 season is the half-time scores. What if everyone went home after 45 minutes? Who are the strong starters and who takes longer to wake up and kick on?

One thing you might tell from this table is how many teams either carved out a result or bottled it in the second half. It’s rudimentary because you can’t say for sure if a half-time loss turned specifically into a draw or a win. But overall it gives a sense.

OK, so we made the playoffs in this version of the league. First up, how annoying. Let’s just do 45 minutes next season, I’m in. Secondly, this probably isn’t a massive surprise – we’ve generally started well this season and faded as the game has gone on. How many leads did we throw away as draws?

Well, the actual answer is; just the one according to this table (plus a further three we lost). It’s rudimentary but I think this table shows the difference between mid-table and playoff contenders. 72 points wouldn’t have been enough for sixth in the official league, but it’s very close.

Officially second in the real league, Ipswich did consistently well. You can see they picked up at least four second-half results that secured their automatic slot. Once again, though, we see Sheffield Wednesday absolutely throwing it away – barely scraping two draws into wins and sticking out the losses. 

One surprise is Plymouth. The league champions are noticeably absent from the top of the Part-Timers table. They finish in tenth due to a massive nineteen draws (strange parallels to our overall performance). However, the Pilgrims scored an astonishing fifty-two goals during the second half – almost double their first-half tally. That’s more goals than nearly half of teams managed in the full ninety minutes. That took them from sixteen half-time wins all the way up to thirty-one at full-time and from 67 to 101 points. 

Down at the bottom, Accrington and Forest Green continue to be relegated. Accrington, though, did pick up points in the second halves to ensure they at least made themselves competitive. FGR, by comparison, dropped ten points in the second 45 minutes to ensure they were dead and buried long before the end of the season. 

One interesting observation about this table is that at the bottom you can see that the points scores are around and about the place they were in the real league. In both cases 46 points mean safety. However, at the top, it’s a little off – about 4-6 points were needed by the leaders and play-off contenders to secure their spots.