'Small sigh of relief' as lowest points tally surpassed

It was never really in doubt - not even this team was going to lose 16 games in a row to end the season - but I have to confess to emitting a small sigh of relief as Sheffield United crept past the dreaded 11-point mark this weekend.

The prospect of 'doing a Derby' has lingered long into our past two Premier League seasons (in 2020-21, we had two points by mid-January) so it is nice to once again be able to check off that particular milestone of misery.

I am convinced that Derby's record is one of the great unbreakable records in all of sport and I would cite this season as proof. United have been abject from the moment they got promoted; selling key players and replacing them with several who have looked way out of their depth; having the worst defence in the league by a mile (perhaps soon to become the worst in competition history), suffering the sort of injuries that typically dog relegation teams, and being on the end of some unbelievably one-sided hammerings.

All that, and we have still gone past the record with 14 games to spare, which really does beg the question of just how Derby managed it.

At the same time, there have been a couple of moments this season where 11 points seemed a long, long way off. Surely, I kept telling myself, as we went 8-0 down at home to Newcastle and 5-0 down at Burnley and Arsenal, even the worst teams can scrape and scrap their way to a couple of wins. And so it proved - it just took slightly longer than was comfortable (and came after yet another 5-0 defeat the previous week).

With that milestone ticked off, the rest of the season feels like a bit of a free hit. The next bar to try to clear should be to get off the bottom of the table and ahead of a Burnley side who have been strangely immune to national mockery on the same scale as United have faced, despite us now having the same amount of points.

Ben Meakin can be found at BladesPod