Five more wins should see us safe.

The 5-0 victory over West Ham on Wednesday evening was a good result, but before expectations start to rise again I feel it is only fair to point out that the win was only worth three points.

This has left us sitting in a very respectable 8th place in the table having played 21 matches and amassing 28 points in the process. This is arguably better than many of us had ever imagined, and it could have been better still had we managed to get our home form on track against the likes of Stoke, Blackburn, Wigan and Blackpool.

The main aim for any newly promoted team is generally trying to get to the magical fourty point barrier as soon as possible. That is generally enough to secure survival, unless you are really unlucky like West Ham and get relegated with over fourty points. That doesn't happen often though, and law of averages suggests that the big 4-0 is what will be needed.

Of course, it could be more than that if the league continues in the same vein and teams continue to pick points up from each other. The unpredictable nature of the league so far means that there is no team that has been cut adrift at the bottom of the table as yet. Still that is of no concern to us, and hopefully won't be at any point from now onwards.

I am starting to think that 15 points will make us pretty certain of assuring Premier League status for next season. Five wins, four wins and three draws or whatever, but that would give us a total of 43 points. A team would have to be desperately unlucky to be relegated on that amount of points, but this is Newcastle and you can never rule out the unlikely.

So where could we pick up those wins? What do our fitures look like for the remainder of the season? Well, broken down into months, they look a little bit like this:

January: Sunderland (a), Tottenham (h).
February: Fulham (a), Arsenal (h), Blackburn (a), Birmingham (a), Bolton (h).
March: Everton (h), Stoke (a).
April: Wolves (h), Aston Villa (a), Man Utd (h), Blackpool (a), Liverpool (a).
May: Birmingham (h), Chelsea (a), West Brom (h).

They are all tough fixtures and nothing is a given in the Premier League, especially this season. We have only two home games in the next two months, which is concerning, especially considering that they are against top four opposition in the form of Arsenal and Tottenham.

To me there is no real run of what you would call winnable games. There seems to be one or two, then a game against one of the top teams. This is a concern, but it is something that the players will have to deal with.

The big question is, can you see us getting 15 points from those fixtures?