Most suggest it’s going to be a season-long relegation battle unless improvement is found...
1. LOW GOAL COUNT
After 11 games of the 2020-21 League One season, Jonson Clarke-Harris (pictured) had already banged in six goals for table-topping Posh. He has two goals in the 2021-22 Championship campaign, both from the penalty spot, and he won’t get the chance to improve on that until the trip to Swansea on October 30 because of a ban. That’s not to put all the Posh goalscoring issues on Clarke-Harris. He is still the joint leading goalscorer at the club alongside Harrison Burrows, Sammie Szmodics and Siriki Dembele. Every other Championship club bar Middlesbrough, Hull and Derby has a player who has scored three or more goals this term. Aleksander Mitorvic (Fulham) and Ben Brereton-Dias (Blackburn) have 10 goals apiece.
2. SUSPENSION ALERT
Dan Butler (pictured) is one caution away from a suspension after picking up four yellow cards. Five cautions in the opening 19 matches leads to a one-game ban. Nathan Thompson and Frankie Kent have collected three cautions each. Posh have picked up 20 yellow cards in total this season (no red cards). They sit eighth in a fairplay table headed by Sheffield United with Middlesbrough bottom.
3. MUCH HARDER TO ASSIST
Jonson Clarke-Harris and Joe Ward (pictured) are the only Posh players to have been credited with more than one assist this season. They have two to sit joint 19th in the Championship assist table which sees Huddersfield Town’s new Welsh international Sorba Thomas at the top with six ahead of Reading’s John Swift and Cardiff City’s Ryan Giles who have five apiece. Last season Ward contributed 13 goal assists in League One, the second most after Aiden McGeady (Sunderland)
4. YOUNG GUNS
The average age of the 23 Posh players to make a Championship appearance this season is 24.5, although some of the youngest players Kwame Poke (18), Joel Randall (21) and Idris Kanu (21) have appeared infrequently. Stats site fbref.com use a weighted system of minutes played to calculate a ‘true’ average age and they give Posh 26.1 years, the eighth lowest in the division, Barnsley (23.7) boast the youngest average age with Derby County (28.4) the highest. Teenager Harrison Burrows (pictured) has appeared in 9 Championship matches.