Another one bites the dust

Palace's Boxing Day defeat at home against Southampton was the catalyst for Steve Parish to pull the trigger and show Neil Warnock the door.

Speculation had been mounting that Warnock and West Brom's Alan Irvine were fighting out to be the first sacking of the season; Warnock won it, but not by much with Irvine leaving West Brom last night after a third successive defeat and seventh defeat in nine games.

It's looking as though it is between two candidates out of work for the West Brom job with both Tony Pulis and Tim Sherwood reported to be in talks. On the surface, Sherwood looks the more likely given the structure they have at West Brom with a head coach rather than a manager. Pulis would surely want more control than has been the case for previous incumbents at the Hawthorns.

The Palace job is the more intriguing. As news broke that Warnock was on his way, and surely saying a final farewell to football management, I don't think anyone would have envisaged that Newcastle boss Alan Pardew would be under consideration.

It's gone beyond that; Palace have agreed a compensation package with Newcastle and it does now look very likely that former Palace player Pardew will be making his return to Selhurst Park.

That would leave a vacancy at St. James' Park with Steve Bruce currently installed as the favourite. I'm sure he'd jump at the opportunity; I believe he is keen to leave Hull and was recently close to landing the Fulham job. The Newcastle job would be the dream job for a Geordie.

Palace have dropped into the bottom three, along with us and Leicester; West Brom are not too far above it.

I was interested to see how many team changes had been made from the Boxing Day games to the next set of fixtures. We all know that Burnley went with the same starting eleven but we weren't the only Premier League club to do that; Louis van Gaal went with the same Man United team for both Christmas games.

There were 59 changes in all. Roberto Martinez made the most with seven, albeit one forced on him because of injury to goalkeeper Tim Howard, and Harry Redknapp was just behind having made six changes.

It didn't do Martinez much good. Everton were one of three teams to lose both their games, the other two were West Brom and West Ham. At the other end, Arsenal, Liverpool and Stoke both picked up two wins.

Appropriately with the last games of 2014 having been played, we are half way in the Premier League season with us all having played each club once.

Only Arsenal in the top group won their last game. It's taken them level with fourth place Southampton on 33 points, three points behind Man United. It would take a brave man though to back against Man City or Chelsea winning the title.

Southampton, by the way, hold the record so far this season for the biggest win, their 8-0 home win against Sunderland, but one other game has produced more goals in total. The eight goals was equalled with Leicester's 5-3 win against Man United but the highest to date is Chelsea's 6-3 win at Everton back in August.

City currently have the best run of consecutive wins with seven, closely followed by their local rivals Man United who have reached six. Chelsea, however, have the longest unbeaten run of 14 games.

Aston Villa and Leicester share the longest run of consecutive defeats with six and Leicester's run of 13 games without a win is also the longest. They have even recorded the least number of clean sheets with three.

The latest results and stats are below along with the leading goalscorers, red and yellow card counts for each club and the New Year's Day fixtures.