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Working for William Hague, I became a connoisseur of terrible pieces of political rationalisation. The people, for instance, who came in to William’s office on the day of the “14 pints” fiasco to explain that it had an upside. But my favourite were those who would look at monumentally bad opinion poll ratings and intone that the party did not, in any case, wish to peak too soon.

These people, presumably, have decamped to Fratton Park. Their job is to explain how Portsmouth are playing well, even though the results are not coming.

How can we tell whether this is true? I mean, besides the fact that they have not won a point. The Fink Tank, as you would expect, has a few ideas.

You see, at this point of the season the league table can be very misleading. By which I mean, even more misleading than it is at the end of the season. Just because Chelsea and Manchester United are on the same number of points does not, for instance, mean that they are doing equally well.

Dr Henry Stott, Dr Ian Graham and Dr Mark Latham use three ways of judging how well teams are doing at this stage of the season. The first is simply our long-term ranking of team quality. This uses goals and shots on goal over the past two seasons and weights them so that the most recent results count most heavily. Naturally this is not a picture of the season at all. But it does distinguish between those teams who have been doing well over the long run and those with a small cluster of good results.

Chelsea top our rankings, very slightly ahead of Manchester United. Liverpool (80 per cent as good as Chelsea) are in third place, with Arsenal fourth (76 per cent). Manchester City have risen rapidly, going from ninth to seventh. For the moment they are still only 40 per cent as good as Chelsea, although this should change. Tottenham Hotspur and Everton are fifth equal and 50 per cent as good as Chelsea.

The next way of looking at the season is to compare the points our model expected the teams to gain by now with the number that they did gain.

The most striking feature of such a table is just how well City have done. They are 7.3 points ahead of where we expected them to be. This puts them at the top of the outperformers. Burnley are up there, too, with 3.8 points more than we thought we would see.

And Portsmouth? Well zero points is zero points. They should have had about eight by now.

Our final effort is to use a method that has been devised by the academic James Keener, employing the Perron-Frobenius theorem. It looks not only at the wins but also at how many wins the team who have been beaten have had, and how many teams they beat and so on.

Do this for both wins and losses and you get what we might term the real Fink Tank table for this stage of the season.

Why the real table? Because it is adjusted for the strength of the teams that have been played so far.

The table is good news for Burnley and bad news for Bolton Wanderers, but otherwise it does not look too wildly different from the Premier League’s version. Clubs doing badly should not, in other words, blame the schedule.

One other thing. There has been a good deal of talk about a goal glut.

Our calculations suggest that there was a 39 per cent chance of this number of goals being scored at this stage. Move along now, there’s nothing to see.