ARSENAL!
Bombardment successful, Gunners in second. Liverpool’s Euro dreams shattered. It’s a good day.
Not much excitement in the EPL table, but shit is blowing up in theChampionship. Four teams within two points of the lead and four more within a point of the playoff. Of course I know nothing about these teams, but have decided to pull for Watford because moose.
Well, Liverpool were crap for the second Premier League game in a row. Really bad play at the back, giving the ball away far too easily, although you have to credit Arsenal for keeping the pressure on. It was all over by halftime, and it was the first time since 1994 that a Liverpool side were down 3-0 at the half.
A spot in the Champions League would now require a miracle. Still, i’m not overwhelmingly disappointed, especially given the awful first half of the season they had. If you had told me, in late November, when Liverpool were in 12th place and looking terrible, that they would work their way up to within a few points of the top 4 by mid-March, i would have happily taken it. It’s disappointing that they’ve stumbled when they had done so much hard work to get back in contention, but it could have been worse.
The only really depressing thing about it is that they fell out with two shitty performances against two of the most annoying clubs in football. One upshot of Arsenal winning games, at least, is that Arsene Wenger, aka The French Whine, hasn’t found quite as much to bitch about over recent weeks. Although this is a guy who, if Arsenal won a game 8-0, with all goals scored from the penalty spot, would probably still find a way to complain about the officials screwing his team.
Should be a really interesting finish. I hope Middlesbrough make it back to the Premier League, and i wouldn’t mind seeing the Canaries of Norwich make a return.
At the other end of the table, it’s amazing how quickly Wigan’s star has fallen. Roberto Martinez kept them in the Premier League by the skin of their teeth for a couple of years, but finally succumbed to demotion in 2013. Now, two years later, they look like they’re on their way down again, out of the Championship.
Blackburn’s going too, only four years after their one-year stint in the top division, although a lot of that is down to an owner who doesn’t give a shit about football, and who pockets every financial windfall the club gets rather than spending it on the team or on the ground, which is in diabolical condition. When Blackpool got about £40 million as a result of its Premier League promotion, the owners kept salaries basically the same as they had been in the Championship, and transferred over £11 million straight into one of their own holding companies. They’ve used the club as a cash cow, and now don’t give a flying fuck what happens to it.
Sorry, you’re thinking of José Mourinho. He coaches [del]The Enemies of Football[/del]Chelsea.
This is not some zero-sum game.
Wenger and Mourinho are both crybaby assholes. 
I watch almost all of Wenger’s press conferences, and your comment doesn’t much resemble reality. I don’t see him bitching about the refereeing anymore than any of the coaches do (which is pretty often, truth be told.) Excepting of course for Mourinho who is infamous for it: “Waaah! Everyone’s against us!” Wenger has never done that to my recollection, i.e. intimated that the referees en masse are all against him.
sputters Not much excitement? The bloody Trafford scum leapfrogged City and people are making title noises about Arsenal, of all clubs. Not that it’s going to happen, of course–I cannot see the #ConspiracyAgainstChelsea holding together well enough to get them to drop that many points between now and the end of the season.
I wish I were as confident about the derby this weekend, which I’ll be watching w/ the Chicago MCFC supporters’ club, because sometimes you need to be with your fellow blues. To be honest, I’m a little edgy about Crystal Palace next week–the lads might look at those cheerleaders, get distracted, and then what? In all seriousness, they’ve got great atmosphere there, and inconsistency, thy name is Manchester City Football Club. To say nothing of a certain lack of motivation that seems to come out when we’re facing “lesser” clubs. Europa League glory, here we come!
I do agree that the situation in the Championship is remarkable; I’d like to see things more like that in the Prem, if it were possible. While the PL is certainly more competitive than some of the other big European leagues (La Liga and Bundesliga, I’m looking at you), with a certain amount of “any given Sunday” possibility for a Burnley to knock off a Man City or a NUFC/Tottenham to romp on Chelsea, there’s still a clear elite, followed by a clear “everybody else.” FFP’s shut the door on outside money coming in–absent a major reform or repeal of the regs, City is the last club that’s going to hit that particular lottery. As the top clubs continue to amass cash, I wonder if we’ll see some attempts to balance the league a little bit in years to come.
I guess if you’re from Manchester (spiritually speaking, anyway) it matters a great deal whether City finishes third and United fourth, or vice versa. The rest of us, not so much. Arsenal aren’t going to win the league, and I don’t think you’re likely to drop into the Europa League, either. I’m glad that Spurs rose into sixth place today (judging from what I’m reading on THFC fan pages, I’m also glad I didn’t see the match today), but I’m sorry it had to be at Southampton’s expense. Now the top six slots are all the “usual suspects”. I see you guys meet at the Globe, I thought that was a Gooner bar.
It may be–I’m actually driving up from Cincinnati for this, so I don’t know for sure how sizable the club is. (I know they’re crap at updating their website, and not much better at twitter.) But at least they’ve got a website and a home bar. For people who actually can be arsed to get out to a pub for the big matches, we’re talking five people in Cincy tops, so it’s gotta be an improvement on that.
At least it won’t be full of the Trafford lot. I went to a place across the river for the LFC-MUFC match w/ a few LFC-supporting friends. It was ugly.
Incidentally, Assem Allam has resubmitted his application to the FA to change the name of Hull City AFC to Hull Tigers, so I am ever more eager for them to completely collapse and get relegated, starting a string of relegations that takes them down the pyramid until, probably somewhere a few levels below the Vanarama Conference, Assem Allam pulls his head out of his ass and puts the team name back again.
Yeah, I noticed after I posted that that you weren’t local. Well, you should enjoy the Globe; despite their allowing disreputable characters to gather there it is an excellent soccer bar with good atmosphere (and a pretty ridiculous beer selection if you’re into that).
I had thought the FA exercised much less control over teams than American leagues do, so I am surprised they need permission to change their name. I agree it would be a change for the lamer. What does the A in AFC stand for, anyway?
Association, from which we get our “soccer”.
Way to go, Crystal Palace!
ETA: Fourth successive away loss for Manchester City. Pellegrini, of course, blamed the refs.
OTOH, it’s not like I actually know what I’m talking about, so maybe I should ask the more experienced fans here.
It seems to me that the seven-point gaps between Chelski and Arsenal and between City and Pool should be nearly impossible to close with only seven games left (and Chelsea actually has one more game left to play than everybody else…against Leicester). But is that right? Would it be unheard of, or at least extremely unusual, for such a comeback to happen this late in the season?
There is a potentially important race for sixth, currently occupied by Spurs (54 points, tied with Liverpool but behind on GD), one point ahead of Southampton. The seventh place team will be left needing the Gooners to win the FA Cup in order to qualify for Europa League (or for Liverpool to both win the Cup and finish 4th or better). I can’t even begin to describe how terrible it would be for Spurs to be in that position.
It’s so weird, because all the British blogs I read are hoping that Spurs fall to 7th so they don’t have to go the the Europa league next year, but if we don’t even make Europa we are losing half the roster of the team. Some would say that isn’t a great loss, and Loris is probably going to Spain next year anyway :(, but still. It would be a blow.
That said, if Spurs win out there is still, technically, the slimmest little chance that they could end up top 4. They would have to win out, but it’s not impossible.
Audere est Facere!!
There is definitely a diversity of opinion about the pros and cons of playing in Europa League. It seems to me that for a young team like Spurs (youngest roster in the EPL if I’m not mistaken) the benefits of learning how to manage balancing the demands of European and domestic play outweigh the negatives. If you’re a veteran club that typically goes to Champions League, it’s probably not worth the distraction.
Well, put it to you this way, the max points from 7 matches is 21 points. In order to pass Chelsea, Arsenal needs to gather 8 more points than Chelsea from those last 7 matches and Man U needs to gather 9 more points from those last 7. If Arsenal wins all the rest of its matches, it will have 84 points. If ManU wins the rest of its matches, it’ll have 83 points. Chelsea currently has 70 points.
So far this season Chelsea has only lost 2 matches and has drawn 7. It’s quite unlikely that Chelsea finish their last 8 games of the season with less than 14 points (14 points in 8 games would be 1.75 pts per match - or something like 4 wins, 2 draws, and 2 losses). And even if they did, that would require that Arsenal play perfect football (ManU would need to be perfect and expect Chelsea to do even worse).
And while Chelsea plays ManU, Arsenal, and Liverpool in its last 8 matches, it plays ManU and Liverpool at home, and the other 5 matches they have left are against: QPR, Leicester, Chrystal Palace (who admittedly are a bit more dangerous than they may have appeared prior to this weekend), West Brom, and Sunderland.
So basically, it’s difficult to really conceive of a way of Chelsea losing the title. Though strange things happen all the time.
That’s about what I figured. Although as Knorf pointed out above, City seem to be in a bit of a free fall, so it may be slightly less implausible that someone could catch them for 4th.
And WRT the Europa League issue, if I adopted the position that I DON’T want Spurs to make the EL, that would have the great advantage of eliminating any theoretical possibility that I might have to be less than totally disgusted should Arsenal win the FA Cup. Well, for now I’ll just assume we will finish 4th. At least. 
It would take a pretty spectacular collapse from Chelsea for Arsenal to catch them. Not likely, I’m afraid, as much as I would enjoy that. Having said that, the Gunners appear to be in fine form and if anyone could exploit some Chelsea weakness, I think Arsenal could.
ETA: We do have an easier final stretch. But probably not easier enough.
Phbbbbt. I can assure that next [del]Ancelotti’s[/del] [del]Vieira’s[/del] Pellegrini’s men visit, Woolwich will be put to the sword. If we can be bothered. Which is pretty much always a question with City.
Also, it’s a bit rich to claim that Pellegrini has ever blamed anyone for anything. I only heard bits of the presser, but I believe (based on previous experience w/ Pellers) that it was something like this, “Uh, there may have been some calls with which we disagreed, but we cannot be concerned about this. We must now focus on winning all of our games, because this is the mentality of champions. No, no, I am not at all concerned that I’ll be fired the day after the season ends.”
I quite like Pellegrini in the abstract, and obviously the man is capable of guiding a team to victory, since he gave us a double last year. But his pigheaded devotion to 4-4-2, the bizarre reluctance to use people we’ve spent significant political or actual capital to sign, the inability to respond when it becomes clear a tactic isn’t working, his recent comments about the youth squad… I won’t be surprised or particularly disappointed if he’s still in charge of the team come next fall. There’s no point in ditching him until we can get a world class replacement.* But I hope the Sheikh is ringing up every potential world-class replacement to see what it’d take to get them here this summer.
- OTOH, if on May 25 City announced that Pellegrini had been sacked, and effective immediately, Patrick Vieira had been appointed first team manager, I would, to borrow a pro-graps term, so fucking mark. Might not last long, but Vieira’s the one “rash” appointment I have to admit I would accept right out the gate.
Incidentally, while the top of the table may be mostly done and dusted at this point (other than City putting its boot on the Trafford lot’s throat in the process of getting back up to 3d, at least), the bottom is just getting interesting. I only caught the second half (and that on radio), but Villa and QPR had quite the slugfest earlier today, all to eventually accomplish… pretty much nothing. Both took a point; I think Villa finished one place higher, as they were no longer tied w/ Hull (and below them on GD).
Leaving aside Leicester–had I not prior commitments to City, I would’ve fallen in love with the mighty Foxes when they humiliated the Trafford scum, and thus consigned myself to a football life of pain. But I’m a realist, and it’s hard to imagine a scenario where they dig themselves out of the relegation zone, even if they do have two games in hand over QPR. So, leaving aside Leicester, we’ve got three points between #19, Burnley, and #15, Sunderland, right now. (The next team up, WBA, adds another three points; I wouldn’t say they’re out of it, but they look fairly safe right now.)
It’s gonna be a scrap; I may find myself surreptitiously watching more of these bottom table matches than City. I won’t make predictions, but I’ll admit that a) Hull [del]City[/del] Tigers should be relegated down the pyramid until AA either wises up or fucks off (he’s said he’d give the team away for free if he’s not allowed to change the name; hey, Assem! I’m not doing much right now, and I’d be more than happy to be a caretaker owner to get the side back stable under their proper name before moving on to being a rich, happy MCFC supporter who is also beloved of the people of Hull) and b) I’d hate to see Burnley or AVFC get relegated. Burnley’ve just been such scrappers this season, from Sean “Ginger Triple H” on down to Dave Fishwick of the minibus empire, that it’s impossible to not love them. AVFC is a big club, historically; I want them to stay in the top flight.