Arsenal beat West Ham in a thrilling contest yesterday.
Arsenal found a way to get their job done at London Stadium yesterday after Mikel Arteta’s side earned them those valuable three points against the Hammers owing to a Leandro Trossard goal and that highly controversial David Raya foul call in the dying minutes.
While these three points take the Gunners closer to their Premier League title, it has also managed to transform the Lilywhites’ relegation picture ahead of Tottenham Hotspur’s game against Leeds United tonight.
Arsenal do Tottenham relegation favor
According to the stats by Opta’s supercomputer, the relegation probability odds for Roberto De Zerbi & Co. have been slashed to only 13.35%, with Nuno Espírito Santo’s West Ham now being the clear favourites to find themselves in the Championship with 86.65% odds of relegation after their run of two consecutive defeats to Brentford and Arsenal in their last two outings.
As mentioned before, that win for Arsenal came with a lot of controversy. West Ham did manage to equalise in the injury time, but VAR intervened with a foul on David Raya. It has been a decision which has drawn a lot of debates among fans and supporters, but it was a fair foul in the end. And to add to the foul, it also gave Tottenham this big boost for survival.
The turnaround for Tottenham has been remarkable. If we just walk a couple of weeks back, Opta had placed Tottenham at 58.57% to be relegated, and at that point West Ham were still sitting comfortably in safety. But since then Tottenham have managed to grab back-to-back wins in the league (away to Wolves at Molineux, followed by that remarkable performance at Villa Park against Aston Villa), and in the meantime the Hammers have taken zero points from their two games.
This is not a time to get complacent though…
So, by these odds, Opta now insists that Tottenham will finish 17th with an estimated 41.35 points on the table, while West Ham will be relegated with a probable aggregate of 38.57 points. And that is where tonight’s game is very important for Tottenham, as a sum of three would put the North Londoners four points adrift of the Hammers with two games of the season to go.
That being said, this is not a reason for complacency, as a defeat tonight and a West Ham win in their next game will put Tottenham’s survival story into a question mark again.