Bluffers Guide To The Weekend: Peculiar Premier League facts and a vast amount of bunkers in the PGA Championship

It has been a tough week for Chelsea’s medical staff and any player in Blue who goes down injured in Sunday’s match against Manchester City had better provide their own Elastoplast. Not only will Jose Mourinho be expecting his players to maintain a clean bill of health throughout the fixture at the Etihad Stadium, he will also be expecting to preserve his team’s remarkable unbeaten run in August. For Chelsea have not lost any of their last 28 Premier League fixtures in the month of August. Their last league defeat in this particular month was against Middlesbrough in 2006.

Arsenal have made their traditional lousy start to the season and Gunners fans will be expecting more limp performances before Christmas, when form usually picks up in time to scrape into the Champions League once more. On the face of it, an away fixture against Alan Pardew’s feisty Crystal Palace is the last thing that Arsene Wenger needs right now. But the wise bluffer will know that Arsenal have won their last five fixtures against Palace, and that last year’s two league games between these two teams had an eerie symmetry: Arsenal won both 2-1, scoring in the 45th minute each time.

Fans of West Ham and Leicester City will have been enjoying their week in the Champions League places, but after the two sides meet on Saturday one or both will surely slip. Leicester will still enjoy a kind of supremacy, though: whatever happens at the weekend they will still have won more points since April Fool’s Day this year than any other Premier League side. If you are bluffing with a pro-Hammers angle, note that the east London side have won seven of their eight previous home matches against the Foxes.

West Brom fielded the oldest side in the Premier League last week, with an average age of 29 years and 14 days – but few of their players would have been old enough to kick a ball the last time that the Baggies met this weekend’s opponent’s Watford in the top flight, in December 1985. West Brom’s latest veteran recruit, Rickie Lambert, will fancy his chances of scoring this weekend: he has netted five times in his last two appearances against Watford.

Bluffers in search of an agreeably quirky stat should look at recent contests between Southampton and Everton, who meet on Saturday on the south coast. Three of the last six goals in this fixture have been own goals, netted by the red-faced Antolin Alcaraz, Seamus Coleman and Romelu Lukaku. And another peculiar note, relevant to Monday night’s match between Liverpool and AFC Bournemouth: the two clubs have never previously met in any league.

And here is a tasty bluffable finding, turned up last week by number crunchers at the BBC: it might be assumed that possession would be the dominant factor in winning top class football matches, but that is not the case at the pinnacle of the English game. In fact, the team with the most possession won only 41% of last year’s Premier League matches, drawing 24% and losing 35%, or – to put it most pithily, 59% of Premier League games last season were NOT won by the team with the most possession.

England’s cricketers, Australian satirists and exhausted statisticians have the weekend off before hostilities resume at The Oval on Thursday, so we turn to golf for some non-football bluffing ammunition.

The PGA Championship is often slightingly referred to as the most minor major, yet a major it is, and one that offers Jordan Spieth a chance to become the first player in history to win the three American majors in a season. If he does that would also be the first time since 1982 that an American player had won all four majors in a season. Seriously impressive bluffers will be able to name the victorious trio from ‘82, for they were a three: Craig Stadler, who won The Masters, Tom Watson, who won the US Open and the Open Championship, and Ray Floyd, who triumphed in the PGA.

Whistling Straits on the shores of Lake Michigan hosts the PGA this weekend, the third “links” course, some will point out, to host a major this year. Ah, the bluffer will say, but it doesn’t play like a links – it has been raining, and it is lush and soft. Justin Rose calls it a “target golf” course.

An even better topic for the professional bluffer is the extraordinary number of bunkers on the Wisconsin facility. How many, is the key question. Pete Dye, who designed the layout, might be expected to know, you would think. “About 1,000” is his best suggestion. That won’t do for us, though.

The editor of Golf Digest, Ron Whitten – who is also a course designer - has made more than one careful count of the Whistling Strait bunkers, and his latest figure is the reassuringly precise 1,012. End of argument.