Of course, you have to defend well in the Premier League and that is something that arguably Fulham and Cardiff have not done. Im not sure on the exact stats on this, but the teams that struggle the most defensively tend to the ones that get relegated. Without putting too fine of a point on it, Fulham have been terrible as a defensive unit this season by conceding 58 goals this season from their 26 games; that means they concede around 2.2 goals per game on average. On paper, Cardiff seem to have performed a lot better by letting in 44 goals from their 26 games this season; an average of around 1.7 goals conceded per match. However, although that is an improvement over Fulham its still the second worst defensive performance in the league. Clean sheets have also been hard to come by, especially for Fulham that have managed only three of them this season. Things have been a little better for Cardiff since they have kept six clean sheets in the league this season. It may not come as any real surprise that both teams have struggled this season with their goal difference; again they have the two worst records in the league, Cardiffs is -25 and Fulhams is even worse at -32. Obviously, poor goal difference is usually a result of conceding a lot of goals, and not scoring many but it also be very decisive this season due to how close the league is.
James Kent is a freelance writer published on Yahoo! Sports, Bleacher Report, FTBpro, Bloomberg Sports and many others. He has also been featured in the Daily Telegraph, Zoo Magazine, MSN Sport and the Manchester Evening News.
His role on What Culture is currently to produce compelling football articles that nearly always use of combination of stats and strong opinion. Feel free to connect with James via Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
