The Weekend Review: The Weekend of Giving Up

It has been a weekend of giving up, in the Premier League. It's all catching up with all of us.

Another split piece for a Monday morning. Everybody gets the Premier League, and the rest is below the cut.

It all started on Friday night, with Manchester City squeezing a 1-0 win from their home match against Wolverhampton Wanderers to continue their Iron Man-like slow stomp towards next year’s Champions League. Wolves arrived off the back of six straight wins which have lifted them to 13th and put in a decent shift, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when Kevin De Bruyne scored the goal that decided things.

Elsewhere in the Premier League, it felt a little bit like a weekend of teams essentially giving up. Liverpool turned up at Stamford Bridge in Hawaiian shirts, with straw donkeys under their arms and wearing sombreros, and were promptly handed their buttocks back on a silver platter at the end of a match which shouldn’t really have required a stoppage-time penalty from ‘Cold’ Cole Palmer to completely settle.

Liverpool weren’t the only ones. In the late Saturday evening match, Arsenal were beaten at home by Bournemouth in the funniest way, by throwing away a lead. Declan Rice got the big flags behind the goal waving, and that kinda looked like it was about as good as things might get, only for two goals in eight second half minutes to spin things on their head. Arsenal have now only won one of their last five, and Manchester City, Newcastle United and Chelsea are still with a more than mathematical chance of snatching second place from them.

Saturday afternoon otherwise featured the teams who gave up before the clocks went back—I’m using that phrase euphemistically, don’t at me—with Leicester City beating Southampton 2-0 in the Battle of the Bald Men Fighting Over a Comb. Jamie Vardy scored their opening goal. Every goal that he scores could now realistically be his last for the club, and he’s currently on 199. Food for thought. In other Relegated Club News, Ipswich Town picked up what might turn out to be their last Premier League point with a 2-2 draw at Goodison. Everton’s recent slump continues. Might be work to do there, in the summer.

In other teams that have given up news, West Ham United played Spurs on Sunday afternoon. They drew 1-1 and remain in the two places immediately above the relegation places. They’d better be hoping that Leeds and Burnley are terrible next season. It says something that I already have little confidence in whoever out of the four who finish in the Championship playoff places to survive next season. Still, at least they’ll make more money. And that’s what really matters.

The final pair of matches that can be loosely tied together are those between Brighton and Newcastle, and between Aston Villa and Fulham, which pitched teams which have yeah, been on the brink of giving up on it all for a few weeks themselves, and teams with something still to play for.

Brighton and Newcastle cancelled each other out, which did nobody any favours beyond Manchester City and Chelsea, while Aston Villa stay 7th. They’re still in the chase for a possible Champions League place, but three points off 5th requires stumbling from others and, with three left to play, not much room for the errors of others.

All of which brings us onto the Inconsistency Derby between Brentford and Manchester United on Sunday afternoon. Such has been the inconsistency from these two teams that when they met, they couldn’t even be consistent within 90 minutes. United took an early lead, then crumbled and fell 4-1 behind, before waking up, remembering that most of them earn at least three times the annual national average salary per week (some multiple times) to do this, and pulled their collective finger out their arses, eventually pulling it back to 4-3.

Ruben Amorim is, of course, focused on Europe and they saw the benefits of this with a commanding performance in Bilbao on Thursday night to make the possibility of the funniest and weirdest European final of all-time—Manchester United vs Spurs, 15th vs 16th in the Premier League, playing off for a place in next season’s Champions League.

But the thing is here that Manchester United and Spurs are both in the same boat. Both have become so preoccupied with Europe that they’ve chucked their Premier League seasons down the toilet in pursuit. And they have both been putting in decent performances in Europe. Spurs’ two-legged win against Eintracht Frankfurt was as good a European performance as they’ve put in, possibly since Amsterdam in 2019.

If they both bring their European game to this, it will be fascinating. If they both bring their Premier League game to this, it will be fascinating for completely different reasons. There has been no news of what happens to Ange Postecoglou at the end of this season. Does Daniel Levy move him out on the basis of the team’s wretched Premier League performances this season—they’re still on course for their worst season since the 1976/77 relegation season—or would qualifying for the Champions League, even if it was by the means of Manchester United turning up in their clown shoes in the final. be enough to keep him in his job?

Of course, there’s an element of risk to saying this when only the first leg of European ties involving these two are concerned. Manchester United would be probing strange new worlds, were they to allow Athletic Bilbao back into the second leg of their match, with a 3-0 lead looking insurmountable. But as they demonstrated on Sunday afternoon, never say never. It seems easier to imagine a world in which Spurs, playing somewhere near the Arctic Circle on an artificial pitch, chuck away a two-goal lead. But again, they’ve been at their best in Europe. So, who knows?