Final day of the season? Isn’t it? Hmm? Permutations? As It Stands tables? News of a vital goal filtering through from elsewhere? Isn’t it? Hmm? At least one meaningless game between two mid-table sides inexplicably ending up 5-4? Marvellous.
Ten simultaneous games, each impacting upon the others as the final formalities of the season are concluded. It’s always great. Sure, the title race might not have made it, but thanks to Tottenham’s inability to finish their dinner and absolute insistence on always being persistently and ludicrously Tottenham about absolutely everything, we do at least have a relegation battle to be decided among the overwrought FINAL-DAY DRAMA.
We thank them, though. For it spares us all having to go through the charade of pretending anyone outside the specific clubs involved really cares much either way about the Race for Europe.
We’re also now fascinated by what happens in Crystal Palace v Arsenal – a game that pits one team focused entirely on a different match a few days later against a team that hasn’t slept for three days. It will either be the best or worst game you’ve ever seen.
But it doesn’t make the cut here. Not on final day. Not ahead of this lot.
Game to watch: Tottenham v Everton
James Maddison described the situation as ‘embarrassing’ but here we are. Spurs are in genuine danger of relegation on the final day of the Premier League season.
Sure, they finished 17th last season with the same number of points they currently have to their name this season. But last season they had been safe for months thanks to there being three rather than this season’s mere two teams cut entirely adrift at the bottom of the table.
And while it was overplayed as mitigation given the sheer scale of the collapse in their form, there was also a clear and undeniable prioritising of the Europa League once safety was pretty much secured by a three-game winning run in February.
The only mitigation for Spurs this year is another catastrophic injury list, yet even that has its own counter-mitigation that Spurs already had a catastrophic injury list in January and decided to sit on their hands lest they be accused of panic. How’s that working out, lads?
Perhaps the most damning element of Spurs’ failure to either back or sack Thomas Frank in January, with results that could still be existentially disastrous if Sunday goes wrong, was on the right wing.
The decision to sell Brennan Johnson for good money early in the window was out of character for Spurs and actually encouraging. Nothing he’d done for Spurs earlier in the season nor for Palace since suggests this was a mistake. But watching Mohammad Kudus suffer a serious injury from which he is yet to return in the very next game and yet failing to even really try to replace either of them in the three remaining weeks of January will feature prominently in the post-mortem should the worst happen.
And, frankly, even if it doesn’t. Should Spurs scrape their way to safety this weekend there really is still no case that either their Chief Arsenal Fan Vinai Venkatesham or sporting director Johan Lange should be spared the boot as a result after overseeing a season of unthinkable ineptitude.
The effects of January’s disastrous attempt at looking like sensible grown-ups when panic was absolutely the correct emotional state are still being felt now, with the clear improvement Roberto De Zerbi has brought to the team in general still massively limited by the sheer dearth of both numbers and quality in the Tottenham attack.
He will once again here have little choice but to field a front three of Richarlison, Mathys Tel and the abysmal Randal Kolo Muani, and hope against hope that when he turns to a half-fit Maddison midway through the second half it isn’t in desperation.
Maddison’s cameos in the last two games against Leeds and Chelsea have shown what Spurs have missed in his absence, but are also damning of the players Spurs do have available. Spurs have looked far, far better going forward in the 20-odd minutes he’s managed in each game despite the fact he is still clearly and understandably miles off it in terms of overall fitness and match sharpness.
Spurs need only a point to guarantee safety (unless West Ham stick 12 past Leeds, which feels like a level of Spursy misfortune even we’re willing to cheerfully dismiss) and really should be able to get it against a team that has rather run out of puff in recent weeks. Everton haven’t won since early March to see realistic hopes of European nights at the Hill-Dickinson next season all but disappear.
But you absolutely would not guarantee it. A decent start feels absolutely vital for Spurs. Even the tentatively improved RDZ iteration of this team still has the most fragile and shallow reserves of confidence imaginable. They are still unable to react positively to any setback whatsoever, and the danger here is that the setback doesn’t even need to come from within their own game this time.
Under De Zerbi, Spurs have visibly wilted after going behind at both Sunderland and Chelsea having been doing absolutely fine before conceding, and went from cruise control to a clear and rattled second best after Leeds’ equaliser at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium a couple of weeks ago.
You do feel Spurs must strike the first blow here to settle their own nerves and avoid giving any encouragement to their rivals.
You can just imagine the noise a tension-addled misery-pit of a stadium will make should news of a West Ham goal filter through. You can just imagine the impact it will have on those nervous nellies on the pitch.
There are nine possible combinations of results from the two games that will settle relegation, and eight of those possible combinations leave Spurs safe. But this is Spurs, and you do just wonder if they don’t have one last catastrophe left in them to top the lot.
If they lose as they absolutely definitely could, it’s over to…
Team to watch: West Ham
It’s out of their hands. They face what is, on current form, a far tougher test than Everton in the shape of Leeds. But they have a chance, and after the abject capitulation at Newcastle last weekend, that was all they could possibly hope for here.
They will have to hope that Leeds are in cigars and flip-flops mode, because under normal circumstances outside of the unique cauldron of the final day, it would be almost impossible at this time to make a decent case for West Ham, after three straight defeats of assorted levels of dreadful, to get a win over a Leeds side unbeaten in eight games.
Leeds had nothing to play for last weekend either, and still produced a win over a Brighton side with everything to play for. We’re not really sure this Leeds team is one currently capable of rolling over and simply donating victory to any opponent at this time, but surely – surely – West Ham will at least this time deliver an all-or-nothing performance for an all-or-nothing occasion having so miserably failed to do so at Newcastle last time out.
Striking the first blow and piling the pressure on a deeply fragile and impossibly vulnerable Tottenham has to be the plan. It’s long-shot territory, but it is perfectly possible the cards fall West Ham’s way if they can just take care of their own business.
Manager to watch: Pep Guardiola
For one final time – as with Fergie, Wenger and Klopp before him, it’s simply inconceivable to imagine him in charge of anyone else in the league – Pep Guardiola will take to a Premier League touchline.
There is now nothing riding on the game itself against Europa League winners Aston Villa, City having failed to challenge Arsenal to avoid one last banana skin on their victory lap by labouring to a draw (even that undeserved) at Bournemouth in midweek.
A domestic cup double with a new-look side in transition means Guardiola’s final season can’t be considered an outright failure, as such, but it’s not quite a successful one either. Not by the standards he has set in a decade of dominance in this league. At its height, it was a domination that stretched to six league titles in seven seasons, often with 95+ points as the price of admission just to challenge them.
That he will leave after two seasons featuring no title challenge at all and then in honesty a pretty ropey one this year will, we suspect, nag at Pep a bit. But he walks away from Our League as its second greatest ever manager.
Given who’s at number one, it’s not a bad legacy.
Player to watch: Mohamed Salah
And another farewell. Slightly less fond, this one, Salah having spent his final season at Liverpool in full Emo Mourinho mode, looking grumpy and at times entirely lost without Trent Alexander-Arnold behind him, while also tilting at windmills in ill-advised post-match interviews and takings to social media.
It’s obviously a real shame, because an undoubted all-time Premier League and Liverpool great is departing under an unnecessary cloud 12 months on from Trent’s own unsavoury Anfield exit.
From our own selfish view, though, this is all very helpful. The problem generally with the ‘Player to watch’ section here is that you are a slave to late injuries and managerial whims and, on one embarrassing occasion, a failure to realise a particular silly sod had in fact got themselves suspended.
Many’s the time we’ve stroked our chin and mused about the vital importance of our chosen player only to see them spend Saturday lunchtime or Sunday afternoon or whatever sat among the substitutes.
Thanks to Salah’s ungrateful teenager stylings, we’re absolutely in the clear here. As Liverpool set about trying to secure the point they need to ensure Champions League football next season, Salah will be without doubt the man to watch whether he’s on the pitch, sulking on the bench, a bit of both or even neither.
On an afternoon of 10 simultaneous games, Salah is still the player to watch even if he isn’t at the ground. Especially if he isn’t at the ground.
Football League game to watch: Hull City v Southampton Middlesbrough
The Championship play-off final not traditionally a game that requires an extra dose of drama, given the stakes involved. But this year we certainly have it thanks to the magnificently hilarious Spygate caper.
It’s all very serious, of course, and Southampton have paid a heavy, heavy price for astonishing stupidity. Easily our favourite thing about it is just how small-time it all is, given it might have cost the club £200m. No drones or high-tech shenanigans here; just an intern with his phone out and not even the wit to disguise himself as a golf-club w*nker to make his planned escape route more straightforward. They deserve everything they get.
Middlesbrough, meanwhile, are victims in one sense but astonishingly fortunate in another. For all the fuss about whether Southampton’s punishment fits the crime, it is at least equally valid to consider the extent of Middlesbrough’s let-off.
The actual real victims are Hull City, of course. They are the one team who qualified without controversy in the traditional style by winning a two-legged semi-final. Yet it is they, the true innocents, who have been most profoundly buggered about by it all.
Southampton were guilty of cheating. Middlesbrough were guilty of losing. Not a crime, sure, but doing so in a semi-final does traditionally end one’s involvement.
Yet both those sides could at least prepare for the fact they would either be facing Hull, or not facing Hull. Hull, meanwhile, only knew for sure less than 72 hours before the final who they’d be playing.
And every one of us knows that the inevitable, inexorable forces of banter dictate that Middlesbrough will surely win the £200m match and become the first play-off semi-final losers in history to gain promotion.
European game to watch: Bayern Munich v Stuttgart
Harry Kane bids for more silverware as runaway Bundesliga champions Bayern take on holders Stuttgart in the final of the DFB Pokal. Easy to just be glib about an assumed Bayern win, but it would be their first Pokal win since their 20th all the way back in 2020. They haven’t even reached the final in the last five years.
Stuttgart won their fourth Pokal last season and have now reached back-to-back finals for the first time in their history. They have been beaten twice in the final previously by Bayern – in 1986 and 2013.
