We’re a month into the season. Everyone’s got four games under the belt. The European competitions and the Carabao are well underway.
The season is officially up and running. That means it’s the very ideal time for an update to the only Premier League table that matters.
Yes, it’s the all-important Mood Rankings, where we consider the far more scientifically relevant (and indeed rigorous) ideas of vibes and feels and suspicions instead of such misleading frippery as stuff like ‘points’.
The quite frequently already hilariously misjudged pre-season rankings are in brackets here, and you can revel in the full wrongness (or in the case of Hull, accidental banter correctness) here.
There is no other option now than to conclude this is simply a football club addicted to shame and mortifying embarrassment.
Every time you think they’ve peaked, they find new ways to make a complete show of themselves.
They’ve gone from the quite funny ‘You’ll finally win a trophy, but you’ll end up 17th in the league but don’t worry, not really in any actual danger of relegation – just imagine!’ to the truly horrific and stomach-churning ‘You’ll win absolutely f*ck all and end up 17th having somehow narrowly avoided relegation despite it being almost impossible to conceive of a worse football team than you’ to this season’s show-stopping ‘You’ll win absolutely f*ck all, will be entirely unable to score even a single goal and will this time very probably achieve your three-year mission of contriving to get relegated despite every in-built advantage you possess, oh, and also you’ll have spent several hundreds of millions of pounds in a desperate and futile bid to avoid all this’.
Tottenham are no longer a football club. They are something between a social experiment and humiliation ritual. They might actually need to get relegated to break the cycle. If that is the case, well, we bring good news: it might well be happening.
There are growing signs of Roberto De Zerbi’s famously uneven temperament bubbling up to an increasingly frustrated surface, with the Italian already reduced to the desperate fan’s forlorn ‘something might click’ triumph of hope over expectation.
A goalless draw at Anfield is nothing to be sniffed at and it does at the very least stem the bleeding, but pre-season worry has still given way to full You Fear For Them status for Fulham. They achieved You Really Do with that defeat to fellow early-season worry-magnets Palace the other week.
Alvaro Arbeloa was an attention-grabbing appointment, but we’re far from convinced it was a good or prudent one. It was the gamble of a club that appears to believe its Premier League roots are far more firmly bedded in than they really are after Marco Silva put a stop to the yo-yo years.
Arbeloa was a kick-on-to-the-next-stage type appointment for a club that just wasn’t there. They needed more of a protect-what-we’ve-got sort.
Also doesn’t help that Arbeloa is visibly nostalgic for his Real Madrid days. Understandable, but Fulham don’t need to keep hearing about Real Madrid or the Real Madrid-adjacent players he’s brought in to keep that personal flame burning.
It really does feel like it’s happening, doesn’t it? That all the obvious risks Manchester United took when appointing Michael Carrick to an interim role when they did and then a permanent role when they did might be coming home to roost.
Does anyone really still have confidence that Carrick is truly the man to make Manchester United great again? There really is nothing about his managerial career to date that he is about to do that. His reputation as a manager is still built on the compelling but undeniably sandy foundation of the sort of player he was. The ‘manager on the field’ sort that Fergie so loved.
We’re not going to sit here and say we expected United to finish last season quite so strongly as they did under Carrick. We will say we were not remotely surprised to see them improve dramatically.
That was always both likely and dangerous. Likely because of just how bad and miserable things had got under Ruben Amorim’s increasingly unhinged and immovably rigid, stubborn reign. But also because, as has been said time and again, Carrick had about the easiest time a big-club manager will ever get.
He was appointed to oversee the second half of United’s season at the precise moment it was confirmed that season would consist of the bare minimum 40 games in total on the back of a failure to qualify for Europe and first-hurdle exits from the cups to Grimsby and Brighton.
That is an absurd position for a manager to find themselves in at This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. Carrick got to enjoy all the benefits of the softest possible schedule while facing none of the blame or scrutiny for how such a schedule had come to pass.
The gamble when United appointed him to that interim position wasn’t that he would fail miserably; it was that he would flourish as he did in that cheat-code world that bears no relation to the normal run of things at such a club.
Carrick has no such pull. There were no marquee signings in the summer of 2026 despite the squad carrying obvious holes and being ill-equipped for the rigours of a full season of all-competition action.
The midfield was renovated from the bargain basement. Signing Youri Tielemans was a shrewd bit of money-saving, but watching Man City’s pair of £100m midfield men march all over him at the weekend was a reminder that United under Carrick are no longer picking up the truly high-end talent. Missing out on Mateus Fernandes doesn’t look like a huge setback right now, but being outmuscled in the transfer market at all by Spurs is a reality check.
Now an underwhelming summer and the knowledge that they’d been backed into a corner that required them to hand a permanent contract to a manager on the basis of half a season’s results that came riddled with caveats have rolled on into a stuttering, unconvincing start to the season.
The absurd injustice of Man City’s winning goal in the derby at Old Trafford is real and worth noting, but the guileless, passive and ultimately gutless way United approached a game against 10 men was of far greater significance than the latest Stockley Park blunder.
There remains a floor at United that will keep them away from absolute catastrophe. There is no real prospect here of a Spurs-style descent. But nor right now does there feel any reason to believe Carrick can succeed where so many other post-Fergie appointments have failed now he’s forced to operate in the real world, one where he has so adroitly already reduced United’s four-front commitments to three.
Who will be the next poor sap through the door?
Victory in the You Fear For Them derby at Fulham is lifting an awful lot of weight at this time for a Palace side that have also already lost games this season to Everton and Ipswich. Too early yet to call those six-pointers, but they certainly feel six-point-adjacent.
They have, entirely understandably, found replacing Marc Guehi and Maxence Lacroix pretty much impossible. It’s far more observation than criticism, but it does look like it’s going to absolutely f*ck them this year after two of the most memorable seasons in the club’s history.
That colander-like defence travelling to face free-scoring Leeds three days after a Europa League clash looks like a massive accident waiting to happen as well.
It’s not all doom and gloom. We really do think they did just about as well as could reasonably be expected when trying to replace Oliver Glasner, with Pierre Sage’s work in Ligue 1 pretty much unimprovable and highlighting a Glasner-like ability to ruffle feathers and bring down loftier opponents.
And making an alarmingly bad start to the season but also still ending up somewhere between 11th and 15th in the end is Crystal Palace heritage. Even in the two trophy-winning red-letter seasons they’ve just enjoyed they ended up 12th and 15th in the league.
It might be that the best they can hope for out of this season is a return to the days when that kind of league effort wasn’t accompanied by trophies domestic and continental. Not that you should rule any English club out of any Thursday night European comp.
Always feels like a bit of a shame when a team promoted into the Premier League for the first time – or after a generation away as in Coventry’s case – get no honeymoon period at all.
The fixture computer was not kind to them, throwing Arsenal and Man City their way inside the first three weeks of the season. But it also feels like Coventry just didn’t do enough in the summer, and there’s little excuse for that now given what we’ve seen happen to promoted teams over the last four years or so.
You can be Leeds, or Nottingham Forest, or Sunderland. Or you can be Burnley, or Southampton. It is harder and harder to justify the Burnley-Southampton option. There’s a quirk here too that it’s the teams who get promoted most impressively who seem to be the most exposed to this mistake, cruelly misled by finding the Championship so easy.
It’s just now very hard to have any real sympathy for clubs who think being conspicuously better than everyone else in the Championship means anything in the rarefied Barclays air. It might seem noble to reward those who got you into the Premier League, to show faith and trust in those players. But also: it doesn’t work.
The glass-half-full approach for Coventry is that they have at least ticked off games against some top opposition. The fact all four teams they’ve played so far are currently in the top five in the table is, at this early stage, a bit too much of a related contingency to be truly noteworthy. The fact they’ve already played three of last season’s top eight is the better way of viewing it.
The glass-half-empty approach lies in the inevitable contrast with the impressive starts made by the other two promoted clubs, which have the twin effects of making Coventry’s own struggles look even worse while also making any possible escape route even harder to locate.
Things will get easier. But results will have to improve fast or a reluctant Coventry and even more reluctant media might have cause to consider the unpleasant possibility that Frank Lampard still isn’t a very good Premier League manager.
There are two things saving Villa from subsiding into the very deepest murky depths of despair at this time. One, the Champions League exists and they are in it. Two, they’ve got Tottenham this weekend.
The former has already allowed them some much-needed escapism from their domestic woes in the form of a thoroughly entertaining and largely impressive 3-2 win away from home against an entirely competent Club Brugge side. The latter offers hope of some respite for those same domestic woes.
Because oh dear god the woes. They did at least manage a goal last time out against Nottingham Forest, but still lost to leave them in possession of but a single point – from a goalless draw against Hull – to show for four games of effort from a necessarily new-look team after the guts were ripped out of the excellent one that finished fourth last season and won the Europa League.
As well as the welcome chance to face a team arguably playing even worse than they are, the trip to visit Dr Tottenham is also personal for Villa, who have of course decided it’s Tottenham rather than Chelsea or Man City, say, who are Everything That’s Wrong With The Game and the club single-handedly stopping Villa’s otherwise clear and inevitable path to world domination.
If you were a betting man, you’d currently have to imagine that Saturday lunchtime trip to Spurs ends goalless. So always remember what yer da told you: don’t back the 0-0 draw, back ‘No Goalscorer’. It’s the same price, but gets paid out as a winner if the only goal is an own goal.
That pretty much never actually happens, of course, but you might as well have the insurance. And let’s face it, the only team right now that feels more likely to lose a game to a cack-handed own goal than Villa is indeed Tottenham. This could be the one.
Everton are going to be absolutely fine this season, but they are also going to be absolutely dull. Unless Jack Grealish is able to activate full Roll Back The Years mode while also staying fit, we’re just not really sure where the fun comes from. Where’s the joy? Where and how are Everton going to be living rather than just existing?
The problem is that it’s around about this point in the Everton Cycle where they start to dream of more and get themselves into the sort of Careful What You Wish For territory that has Ollie Holt rehashing all his old West Ham columns.
The good news – for Holt, if not Everton – is that he won’t even have to find-and-replace the manager’s name this time. He can even keep in the bits about moving to a new stadium. He’ll just have to change the club name. And, alas, the bit about the manager winning the club a trophy after the longest of waits.
Basically fine. Sure, you’d like a win on the board by now. And they should really have beaten both Newcastle and Brentford in games that both ended in 2-2 draws.
But basically: fine. Their only defeat was a narrow one to Manchester City and the three subsequent draws all indicate that Marco Rose’s Bournemouth still look very much like Andoni Iraola’s Bournemouth and that was always the most important thing from the early days of this season.
And at the end of the day, they’re playing a Europa League game in Spain tonight. If you’re a Bournemouth fan and still feeling anything other than giddy at that fact then you don’t have blood in your veins.
The only very slight word of caution right now is that those slightly careless draws against Newcastle and Brentford could result in a pretty significant worse-before-it-gets better scenario domestically. Their next two league games, either side of that interminably long September-October megainterlull, are against Liverpool and Chelsea.
We remain a world away from Fear For Them status, clearly, but it’s also very easy now for Bournemouth to suddenly if fairly misleadingly find themselves approaching late October still searching for a first Premier League win of the season.
Another of the many clubs getting a tentative passing grade at this early stage of the season. Forest have the look and feel of a solid set of mid-table Premier League operators, which makes the first-hurdle exit from the Carabao a bit disappointing because that looked a lively avenue for a Europe-less squad to explore.
But if you’re going to go out of the Carabao early, at least do it in a non-embarrassing way. And these days, losing to Leeds qualifies.
Back on the Premier League grind, last weekend’s win at Villa feels like a significant one. They’d played perfectly well in their first three games without getting the results they perhaps deserved. And there’s no getting away from the fact that playing Spurs and not beating them at this time is quite mortifying.
But they’ve overcome their shame and embarrassment rather impressively. They had a good summer. Some clever buys. The vital retention of Morgan Gibbs-White.
And, of course, appointing a decent manager who at time of writing hasn’t even been sacked yet.
It could be much, much worse. Given the summer they endured and the enforced changes they had to make, it was very easy to see how it could have descended swiftly into despair.
It still could, because the significance of their early-season results still feels hard to pin down. The four points they purloined from Liverpool and Spurs definitely still feel like they might tell us a lot more about Liverpool being mediocre and Spurs being wretched than they do about Newcastle’s level.
The late draw salvaged against Bournemouth points to an impressive fighting spirit, but also they were still 2-0 down at home. And then they got absolutely slapped silly by Leeds.
So it’s all a bit hard to quantify, a bit too tricky to try and extrapolate what it might mean for the weeks and months to come. But what it absolutely hasn’t been is the catastrophic start they could have suffered with a new-look, unready side after some wrenching summer departures.
The new manager has been impressive which is of outsized importance given he arrived as such a relative unknown. The Liverpool game and Bournemouth comeback in particular highlight a togetherness that Newcastle will need to harness; a kind of siege mentality could work well for a club that feels its raging against a system it cannot beat.
They do also look to have a lovely little run of games coming up now. If they can avoid disaster against high-flying Hull(!) before the international break, then there’s a real chance to kick on after it. After the September/October break and before the November one they face Coventry, Aston Villa, Palace, Everton and Fulham. It’s a who’s who of this season’s assorted Fear For Them clubs, as well as that Villa game where presumably everyone will just hold hands and sing songs about PSR being beastly and unfair.
Newcastle were and are a club that could easily fall prey to a crisis narrative this season, but that run of games offers a clear chance to get well out in front of things.
It’s… okay, but it’s not quite right, is it? There’s just something missing right now from a Liverpool side whose only domestic victories this season have come against newly-promoted Ipswich in the league and a now permanently crisis-addled Spurs in the Carabao.
Liverpool this season look like they’re going to be what most people would have tipped them to be before a ball was kicked: a lively threat in any cup competition up to and including the Champions League, and probable qualifiers for that same tournament again next season.
And, sure, that’s okay. But there’s just such a sense of a missed opportunity at Liverpool given where they were a year ago. After winning the title in Arne Slot’s first season and then spending all of the money on all of the good players, the talk was of a new dynasty. Of Liverpool back where they belong at the very summit of the English game.
And they are not that. The brutal assessment is that they’ve gone back to what they have been for most of the Premier League era. A very good team, one that is a lively threat in any cup competition up to and including the Champions League, and probable qualifiers for that same tournament again next season.
Meanwhile, it’s Arsenal eyeing up a dynastic era with Manchester City as either their most plausible or only challengers depending on how you view things at the start of this season.
Feels like, sure, things could be much worse for Liverpool. But also that they could (should?) be so much better.
And then there’s the manager. We like Andoni Iraola a huge amount and do fancy his chances of defying the trend for what happens to managers who make the step up from well-run smaller Premier League club to gigantic one. But there’s also no denying that there is a significant trend there for him to buck.
We must also allow ourselves a chuckle at the fact that one of the things we keep saying about Iraola is that he won’t be able to get away with staying under the radar at Liverpool by having unbeaten runs that are actually just full of draws in the same way he did at Bournemouth, and yet right now he is doing quite literally that. Listen, fair play.
Might all have to hold our hands up and say we got giddy about Chelsea appointing the handsome and bearded Xabi Alonso and then making a subtle shift in their transfer strategy from ‘spend hundreds of millions of pounds on any tradeable player assets we can secure’ to ‘spend hundreds of millions of pounds on footballers that improve the overall make-up of our actual first-team squad’.
They’re title contenders, we all agreed. They’re the real deal! They’ve even bought a goalkeeper!
But, they still can’t defend, sadly. No matter of Europe-less one-game-a-week easy mode is going to make up for that fact in the final analysis, and the early optimism that was given a slight jolt by defeat at Arsenal has come now to a juddering halt with that naff effort against Hull.
Only Coventry, Ipswich and Palace have shipped more goals than Chelsea’s nine, and that is not the sort of stat upon which meaningful title tilts are built. The early evidence suggests Chelsea are going to be a tremendous amount of fun – their four Premier League games have featured 19 goals and they’ve also had a very silly 6-3 Carabao win over Leeds – but fun doesn’t win titles.
At the end of the day, 6-3 is a tennis score. Not a football score. Be less silly. Stop doing that. Although we would recommend sticking with this ‘always scoring an early goal’ feature. That could have legs.
Our worry for Sunderland before a ball was kicked – and the reason for their lowly pre-season rating – lay in the fact there was a lot of potentially self-fulfilling chat about Second-Season Syndrome. We feel quite strongly it only becomes a thing if you let it become a thing. It is a self-inflicted condition.
Getting an early game in against Fulham has helped a few clubs this season, and Sunderland are certainly among them. Their win in that game makes their league record look okay. There are very few teams who should feel disappointed at leaving Brentford with a point, and they gave Arsenal a perfectly decent game as well, one that could easily have gone the same way as last season’s contest.
They did enough to have Mikel Arteta at his disingenuous, performative ‘I just worry about the game I love, that’s all’ best, and that’s not nothing.
The less said about the Ipswich game the better, but they do seem to have put that behind them.
And they’re up and running in the cup competitions with victories in both the Carabao and Europa League. The very existence of the words ‘and Europa League’ in that sentence has to for now be enough to keep the mood chipper.
Especially if that chipper mood can be sustained until December when we will quite literally see Mackems in Milan, which is absolutely lovely stuff.
Sh*tting all over Spurs on the opening day looks gradually less impressive with every passing day, but that’s not remotely Brentford’s fault. They did the necessary that day and continue to look every inch the competent Premier League team that Thomas Frank built and that Keith Andrews has improved in almost every way.
Still unbeaten. Still going in the Carabao. You cannot grumble at this start. And even the reduced impressiveness of beating Tottenham on the opening day is countered by the fact that the subsequent draw at Leeds is a result that seems likely to grow ever more impressive as the season progresses.
Might just be in the perfect spot for a promoted club of making a very good start to life back in the top flight while not being the club that everyone’s focused on.
Hull are only two points better off than Ipswich but are very much the club drawing focus at this time. How Ipswich’s most famous fan might currently wish he too could escape the spotlight at this time.
Another little thing that could prove significant in Ipswich’s favour is that they never really have a run of games where you think the life and momentum could completely disappear from their season. The closest thing to it is having to play Chelsea and Arsenal in successive league games twice. But the first time it’s followed by a home game against Coventry, and the second it’s preceded by a home game against Spurs.
They really do have every chance of being good enough to just quietly and largely out of the spotlight just steadily accumulate enough points to be absolutely fine. Which would be some effort.
We still have this nagging doubt that it all might be a bit Liverpool 25/26. That City’s flawless start isn’t quite all that it seems. At the very least, that the foundations underpinning it are less rock-solid than Arsenal’s, which is the thing that really matters.
But also, you know, fair f*cks. Already easy to forget that after the Community Shield capitulation there was already talk of City being in crisis and many words thrown around espousing the fraudulence of Enzo Maresca before the season had even started.
Arsenal were the known quantity in this title race, to the extent that we had and still have doubts over whether there will even in fact be a title race. But for Maresca to come along and cede not one inch of ground in the first month of the season is undeniably impressive, even if City’s performances haven’t always been.
But they were very good indeed at Old Trafford, comfortably the better side even when it was 11 v 10, and it’s already starting to look like throwing £200m+ at their central-midfield rebuild was not in fact an act of purest folly.
Elliot Anderson was the best player on the pitch in his first ever senior derby (of any kind – he never played in a proper one for Newcastle or Forest) and this City team have looked like one in need of a true sh*thouse for quite some time now. In Enzo Fernandez, they now possess the sh*thouse’s sh*thouse.
It does still very much look to us like there’s one better team than City out there this season. But also that it is very much only one. That was not so easy to say a month ago.
If, like us, you find other people’s happiness unbearably nauseating then you really don’t want to look too closely at Arsenal right now. Rarely has a pig been more gleefully in shit than the Gunners right now.
They are in their very happiest of happy places, absurdly now after the Sunderland game somehow managing to concoct a situation where they are not only winning all their games in fairly impressive fashion but also getting to play their very favourite role of performative victims of The Conspiracy, something that, you must understand, they only draw attention to out of their altruistic concern for the wider good of the game.
It’s not their fault that the clearest and most existential threat to football fairness just happens to be the very idea of a penalty being given against them.
We can just about tolerate Arsenal winning all the time. We can just about tolerate Arsenal believing they are the only team who ever have a decision go against them and that it must be real and powerful evidence of some dark evil at work.
We absolutely cannot tolerate both at the same time. None of us should have to.
Ended last season looking like a perfectly cromulent Premier League team and have started this one looking even better than that. By the end of last season, Daniel Farke had found a solid formula and a formation that worked. His team had guile and guts and smarts that saw them ease well clear of any relegation unpleasantness in the end.
There’s now a good deal more artistry and flair added to the foundations established last season, making Leeds a compelling prospect. The way they dismantled an admittedly dismal Newcastle was striking and, while their current position as best of the rest behind Arsenal and City will almost certainly prove fleeting, it certainly isn’t deceptive.
They almost certainly won’t end up as the country’s third best team, which we admit is a truly molten take. But that is what they’ve been over the first few weeks of the season. If you don’t believe us, try and make the case for anyone else. We will maybe consider the charming claims of Brighton by sheer weight of goals scored, but that’s about it. We’re definitely not interested in any talk involving any other members of the Big Six or indeed Eight.
They drop a place or two from the summit here only because of unexpected levels of glee-boost at other clubs. Leeds are precisely as good and thus precisely as happy as expected, which rather unfairly makes it count for very slightly less.
Doesn’t generally pay to get too giddy too early in the football season. Early-campaign overexcitement is a real and deadly disease. You only have to go back a year to find Spurs feeling pretty good about themselves.
So yes, care and a bit of ‘Too early to tell for sure’ circumspection are no bad thing. But what is football if not a game for dreamers? What’s the point of it all if we spend the whole time bogged down by realism and playing down expectations? At the end of the day, save that sh*t for the real world football is supposed to offer an escape from.
And in that spirit we ask the question: what, exactly, is the limit of Brighton’s ambitions this season?
We’re really not sure there should actually be one. At the very, very least, this should be a season that goes down as the greatest in the club’s history. Because winning the Europa Conference League and with it a first major piece of silverware secures that achievement.
But it’s also the thing that makes everything feel so exciting right now. Because that’s now the baseline for this being a good Brighton season. They absolutely should follow West Ham, Chelsea and Crystal Palace in winning that trophy and giving the club and the town a moment the like of which they’ve never had before.
That’s an incredible thing to consider as the starting point of what the season might bring. Because right now Brighton sit fifth in the league having already played two of the vanishingly few teams who also look like they might actually be any good this year in Chelsea and Leeds.
Brighton lost a seven-goal humdinger to Chelsea and played out a high-quality draw with Leeds that will have left both teams feeling righteously optimistic about the year ahead.
They’ve also had a couple of games against ropey teams, and they’ve been fantastic. A moribund, shoulder-chip-addled Aston Villa were thumped 4-0. The Seagulls then went one better against a Coventry side who had lost – unluckily – by only a single goal at Manchester City the weekend before.
They’re still in the Carabao after seeing off Manchester United at Old Trafford – a handy little habit Brighton have picked up in recent years.
There was also another 4-0 win over Tromso in the Conference qualifiers that doesn’t mean much on its own, but when it forms part of a formline that gives Brighton a third victory by a 4-0 or 5-0 scoreline by mid-September it does rather catch the eye.
The Conference is the obvious place that magic could happen for a club that has no trophies and has just had to watch Crystal Palace win two in successive seasons. But it is far from the only possibility.
This is a Premier League season – and by extension domestic season in general – rich with possibility for a club that has long stood out for the smartness of its operation but never more so than right now.
The 26/27 season is, frankly, a batsh*t one at the top of English football. Over half of the current Premier League clubs have changed their manager this year. Of those clubs, more than one are now already seriously considering a further change. Four of the current top five in the Sack Race betting were appointed this year and the odd man out is Frank Lampard, who only made it back into the Premier League this year.
Among the vanishingly small group of what we could term established Premier League managers, Unai Emery and David Moyes (18 months in one job definitely counts right now) are in the top eight of that same Sack Race betting.
The only manager who’s been around their current Premier League job longer than Fabian Hurzeler and considered more secure is Mikel Arteta.
That’s the level of advantage Brighton have over everyone else this season. They also had a Brighton Max summer. There were the usual bargain signings and big-money sales, but also serious cash splashed on the most promising younglings – most notably Luka Vuskovic – but also established talent from Our League like Pascal Struijk.
The reality of this season is that there were very few teams who came into it knowing exactly what they planned to do, and even fewer who are now actually doing it.
Outside the literal champions of England, nobody fits such a description more perfectly than Brighton. For now they find themselves in what will almost certainly be a Champions League-securing position in the league table.
There is absolutely no good reason why staying there is an unreasonable stretch target for a club on the cusp of something huge.
Yeah, not a bad start, we suppose. ‘Sokay. Probably pretty happy about it, aren’t they? As we said in August:
We have long held the view that a team that battles their way through the Championship by defying the numbers and stats might be better placed to have a crack at the Premier League than teams that have dogwalked the division and then get a rude shock when they can’t do that any more in the top flight.
We don’t understand how, for instance, Burnley are constantly surprised every time they p*ss their way through a Championship season that it suddenly gets a lot harder in the Premier League. You’d think they’d have twigged by now.
But Hull, the clever sausages, will have no problem adapting to the Premier League being hard because they made the Championship look hard. It might be genius.
Just ignore the bit we also said about how, alternatively, they might keep Derby fans interested into the second half of the season. Coventry and Spurs now the Rams’ best bets there.
We also like their kit and will fight anyone who disagrees on that. Which is surely just as important as the mighty impressive on-field results. Maybe more important… no, as important.
We are also enjoying going ‘Sunderland did it’ after everything Hull do this season in the style of the infamous ‘Simpsons did it’ South Park episode. Which again to us – if nobody else – is a bonus.