Norwich are flying high at the top of the Championship and looking imperious.
They won their first two games in March without conceding and Pukki’s double against Luton on 6 March took him to 20 goals for the season.
The Canaries results have been so good that they accumulated 76 points after playing 35 games, giving them an average of 2.17 points per game.
Taken over the course of a whole season, that would give them 100 points and surely make them the Championship title winners.
It’s unsurprising then that high street bookies such as William Hill and sites like 32Red casino, after reviewing stats like these, make them firm favourites to start 2021/22 in the Premier League, with some sites giving them odds as short as 1/9.
To put that into perspective, that means a bet of £10 would give you a return of just £11.11 (a profit of £1.11).
Keeping their manager and most of their key players (Aarons, Buendía, Cantwell, Krul and the aforementioned Pukki all remain from their 2019/20 EPL campaign) certainly helps.
But plenty of teams have dropped back into the Championship and continued to lose games. Indeed, Sunderland dropped into England’s second tier and were immediately relegated to the third.
Norwich’s form has been something else.
At the time of writing, the Canaries have won five games on the spin and 66% of the 35 games they’ve played. Adding context to this, Sir Alex Ferguson had a 65% Premier League win rate and he knew a thing or two about title-winning form.
This form is being driven by superb individual performances throughout Norwich’s team. Tim Krul has the best clean sheet percentage in the division (60%), Emiliano Buendía tops the assist chart (11) and Teemu Pukki sits second in the scoring charts.
Commentators and betting companies are confident this form can keep up.
The dedicated Canaries channel, Boleyn’s Lost Her Head, claim the team are “better than ever before” and there’s good evidence to believe this is the case.
We’ve already highlighted that Norwich are on course to get 100 points this season. They managed 96 in winning the 2018/19 Championship title.
As far as the players go, Pukki scored 29 goals in 43 games in the 18/19 campaign at a rate of 0.67 per game.
He’s scoring 0.69 games per game this time round and respected sports betting sites believe this will be good enough to make him the second highest scorer at the close of the season. They’ve got Pukki at 9/2 to top the charts, with only Ivan Toney (on 1/5) ahead of him.
Norwich are on song right now and have been throughout the 2020/21 season. Their form is only getting stronger and their key defenders (from goalkeeper up to striker) are all at the very top of their game.
It’s not a question of if the Canaries’ form will be good enough to win the league but when it’ll make it impossible for their rivals to catch them.
