Our recent run of games have been against Man City, Liverpool, Wolves, Newcastle, Man U, Chelsea and Leicester.
That's a tough schedule. The only fixtures of those where realistically we should be expecting to take points would be newcastle (which we won) and wolves (which was admittedly disappointing after the cup win). We got spanked by Leicester who everyone are now saying are the only realistic challengers to Liverpool (who we ran very close). We drew with Man U and could have won it. Man city are Man city.
Point is, we've been competitive in most games against top sides. It's not realistic to be expecting us to beat those teams. Anything we get is a bonus. Four points from the above games is not catastrophic, particularly given how we've generally been playing.
What we get from the next few games- Sheffield, Southampton, Norwich, Watford and Burnley will be much, much more revealing, and I expect us to be comfortably above the relegation zone after those games. If we're not, then we might need to start thinking about where we need to strengthen in Jan.
Context is everything, people. If we're gonna judge our progress by how we do against title contender, well guess what, we're gonna fall short.