League is packed with clubs recalling past glories and desperate to escape it but success shouldn’t just be for the moneyed eliteThe Premier League champions of 2015-16 play the winners of one of the greatest FA Cup finals. One of the original two super-clubs play the most successful Welsh side of all time. The seventh-most successful side in league history play a former Uefa Cup winner. Sunday’s Championship fixture list serves as a reminder of how fortunate the English (and Welsh) league is to have such depth – and perhaps also as a warning.All six teams in action – Leicester, Coventry, Leeds, Cardiff, Sunderland and Ipswich – have won the league title or the FA Cup or both. Of the...
No team with talented players such as James Maddison, Harvey Barnes and Youri Tielemans should be this badAs the clock ticked past 80 minutes the King Power Stadium, with Leicester beating West Ham but hostage entirely to events at Goodison Park, it felt fitting that this should be one of those relegations sung to its rest by ghosts of other games, of goals unscored, energy waves, rumours, the Mexican wave of death.Several times through those final 10 minutes the ground was gripped by sudden contortions of false joy, leaping, roaring sections of crowd lifted by news of fake survival, reality-lag, non-redemption. If Bournemouth score a non-goal and nobody tells the King Power it doesn’t exist: is that non-goal still a...
Everton have relegation battle in their own hands, Aston Villa fans face a dilemma and there will be emotional farewells galoreFor the third time in 29 years, Everton’s Premier League status is on the line on the final day at Goodison Park although, unlike against Wimbledon in 1994 or Coventry in 1998, survival is in their own hands. The task sounds straightforward enough: beat a Bournemouth team with nothing to play for and a 70th consecutive season in the top flight is guaranteed. Everton, though, have an aversion to the straightforward. Sean Dyche does not have a decent striker available with Dominic Calvert-Lewin, who has been integral to the team’s recent improvement, hamstrung again. Unless Vitaliy Mykolenko recovers from a...
Club’s supporters’ minds will start to wander to potential trips next season after long-awaited return to Champions LeagueThe roar at kick-off, the roar that had been there in most of the previous 18 home games of this season, was maybe given a few extra decibels here. Added to renewed hope, present all season, was a touch of yes, this really is happening.Then came the moment, with fireworks being wedged into the tops of milk bottles, at the beginning of stoppage time, when Nick Pope was finally forced into some sort of movement to deny Timothy Castagne, to make sure it did happen. It came after one of the Newcastle keeper’s slowest days of the season, after what had often resembled...
The short-term reasons for the former champions’ decline are various but their season of famine shouldn’t be a surpriseAll life, Valeriy Lobanovskyi once said, is a number. Which might have made sense for the groundbreaking Dynamo Kyiv manager, with his high-school medal for mathematics, but for most people who follow sport is a little disconcerting. We want to believe in heroes and glory, in imagination and genius, in fate and curses. Even if we acknowledge it probably is quite important, the thought of football as a series of vast interlocking spreadsheets feels a little dry.And in the day-to-day we want ready explanations. We want to know that this game was won or lost because this forward or this keeper was...