The team that finished 8th should have, by all the metrics, finished an awful lot lower than they did.
Did the terrible decisions and bad luck account for where we should have finished last season, or was it because the players were just bad even with four at the back?
Seems like some have also forgotten last season, we had the most absurd amount of injuries, the whole season.
I don't think statistics work like that. We were around the top 6 for most of the season, until things really deteriorated at the end of the season. We were 6th after 34 games, however bad it was, it was still better than things now.
Playing that many games, with no squad to rotate, was impossible.
I still would have wanted to see much more, but you can even see with City/Arsenal this season how much difference injuries of a few key players make.
The metrics most use to argue that, is a ranking based on xG - xGA, where the team with the highest difference is number 1 and the team with the lowest is number 20.
However, if you have a horror match, where you concede a lot of xG, it is just one match and shouldn't be aggregated to determine multiple (expected matches). That is the fundamental flaw in that reasoning. One match cannot count for multiple matches, you cannot lose 7 points to Liverpool just because they battered you.
All teams below us, had even worse of a goal difference than we did and only west ham scored more than we did. This we should have been 15th talk is rubbish when we were close to top 4 even by gameweek 24.
Under EtH we had quite a few matches were completely battered and conceded so much xG, but in general, though conceding many shots, he found that we were able to grind some results in most matches even if we didn't dominate at all. He was playing survival football all season.
It was already quite a lot better this season apart from the Spurs match under him, and we were quite unlucky in a few matches with dodgy decisions.
All in all, it was nowhere near good enough though.