Premier League analysis from the Racing Post's Mark Langdon

It doesn't take too long searching Google to find barely believable facts that are apparently true.

Hunting unicorns in Michigan is legal, cows moo with regional accents, you're twice as more likely to be killed by a vending machine than you are a shark, putting Viagra in a vase makes flowers last longer and yet none were more mind-boggling than the Premier League table.

Watford are not in the bottom three. Stats amazing.

I'm not quite sure why I assumed they were. Perhaps it was whenever I've seen them they have been awful, or perhaps it was the fact they sacked their manager, or maybe it was because they seem to lose every week.

But I have checked the table again and Watford have won the same amount of games as Crystal Palace. That's the same Crystal Palace who are above Leicester and that's the same Leicester who are only two points behind Manchester United.

I'll stop in a minute - I promise - but for all of United's woes they've won just one league game fewer than Liverpool. And Liverpool have only two more points than Arsenal despite having a goal difference 20 superior to that of the in-form north London outfit.

It's a chaotic table and it's why it should always be taken with a pinch of salt anyway.

Solace can usually be found in the xG table but we may need to switch that on and off again because Brentford and Everton are in the top six, while United, Arsenal and Tottenham find themselves in 12th, 13th and 14th respectively.

Brighton finished 16th last season with an expected-goal difference of plus 0.37 per game which was the fifth best in the Premier League according to the figures of fbref.com. They are now sitting seventh with an xG of minus 0.16 per 90 minutes. It's a funny old game.

Knowing where you are in the pecking order can be difficult to decipher but it's easy to understand the decisions of Norwich and Aston Villa earlier this week to bin off Daniel Farke and Dean Smith.

Farke's Premier League results had been too bad for too long and having seen Smith's side live earlier this season it was remarkable how lacking in direction Villa appeared to be. It took something very inept to make Nuno's Spurs look half decent and Villa managed it.

The issue is whether they replace them well, but at least Villa were looking in the right place with Ralph Hasenhuttl being linked with the job before Steven Gerrard arrived from Rangers.

Hasenhuttl is one of the most underrated managers in the league. I am reliably informed that even by the obsessive nature of coaching at the highest level he is an absolute workaholic and you can see it in everything Southampton try to do each week.

Yes, you have to forgive a couple of 9-0 defeats but he is once again coaching his socks off, improving youngsters on a shoestring budget which saw Southampton make a £15m profit on transfers in the summer.

Crystal Palace would be seen as a similar size club and their net spend was £66m, so that's the kind of handicap facing Hasenhuttl, who lost Danny Ings and Jannick Vestergaard but has lifted Southampton up to 13th and they are top-half on xG too.

If you keep kicking around the bottom third eventually relegation is likely to bite, but even if that happens bigger, wealthier clubs should be casting admiring glances towards Hasenhuttl.

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