The Weekend Review: You'll Sometimes Walk Alone

Liverpool are the Champions and Manchester City is the Cup Final. Argue among yourselves over whether nature, or indeed anything, is healing at the moment or not.

A split piece article for a Monday morning. Everybodys gets a round-up from the Premier League, but for paying subscribers I’m delving down into the EFL and the National League as well. As ever, this piece will completely free for all on Friday morning.

Has there been a more predictable afternoon all season than last Sunday? Needing a point to lift the Premier League title, Liverpool were at home against the gutless and cowardly Tottenham Hotspur. Before the match came the familiar greeting. Red smoke and Red Bull. And then Spurs took the lead. But then Liverpool came back, reminded everybody watching of the vast chasm in quality between these two teams, win the game 5-1 and lifted the trophy to a chorus You’ll Never Walk Alone. It all felt a little bit like watching an end of season animation in FIFA. But then again, that’s the sort of synchronicity they’re looking for these days, isn’t it?

It remains as difficult to say anything about this Liverpool team as ever. They have been the best nin the Premier League all season, of that there is no doubt. Everyone else has had, to some extent or other, a fundamental flaw that was always going to get in the way of their title aspirations.

But Liverpool just kept chugging along, winning matches with relatively little fuss, getting the job done. None of this is intended as criticism. You do what you have to do. And this is ultimately the endgame of a plan that has been a long time coming. A certain Herr Klopp will have been in a lot of people’s thoughts yesterday.

Yet the man who deserves the congratulations is his replacement. Replacing a generationally popular manager is always difficult. Liverpool only need to look 40 miles up the M62 to Old Trafford in order to see that. But Arne Slot clearly understood the assignment. Liverpool were already close to being the finished article that they could have been had Manchester City not spent exactly the same period of time transmogrifying into an oil-fuelled, trophy-winning machine. He kept faith with the best elements that Klopp had brought to the team and refined their tactical system. He kept them ticking over as everyone else fell away. They are now, deservedly, the champions of England.

The positioning of this match in the timetable at exactly the same time as the second of this weekend’s FA Cup semi-finals tells a story in itself about the game in this country. It’s easy to get sucked into the narrative that the League and the Cup are bedfellows, but in truth they’re enemies. The FA, the Football League and the Premier League are all ultimately in competition with each other.

It was a bad weekend for this season’s upwardly mobile clubs. In the match which clashed with the Liverpool match, Manchester City rolled out the old tunes to sweep Nottingham Forest aside with a comfortable 2-0 win. A day earlier, Aston Villa simply failed to turn up for their match against Crystal Palace and were appropriately rewarded with a 3-0 loss.

Back in the Premier League, meanwhile, every other result went more or less exactly as might have been predicted. Chelsea beat Everton 1-0 to continue their push towards a return to the Champions League, while Newcastle United brushed aside Ipswich Town to confirm the final relegation spot for the season.

In case you were looking for a prediction, there will be dozens of worthy articles about how this three-up-three-down relegation situation is damaging for both the Premier League and the Championship, and then precisely nothing will happen to change it. Will Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich turn things around next season? Stay tuned to find out, but keep in your head if they are clear at the top of the Championship table next season. That’s how big the gulf is.

Meanwhile, the insurance provided to the biggest remains as great as ever. Manchester United continue to play with the consistency of a sticky toffee pudding, but they were the beneficiaries of a slightly dubious-looking red card and a late equaliser at Bournemouth to allow a tiny dopamine hit of celebration into their season-long soap opera? Will this be the goal which sparks them to life, Mark-Robins style? No. Nobody is seriously making that argument any more. Ruben Amorim needs a completely rebuilt squad during the summer. Where the money comes from to fund that is anybody’s guess.

The three remaining Premier League matches of the weekend also went according to plan. Brighton kept the flickering flame of European football just about alive with a 3-2 win against West Ham, but they needed a 92nd-minute goal to get over the line against a team whose season is deflating like an old balloon.

Before the match, I noted a West Ham-supporting journalist saying that Graham Potter had “lost his mind” with his team selection. This was his team’s seventh game without a win, and they remain one place above the relegation places. Whether they’re safe from relegation or not feels like something of an irrelevance when they’re so lowly in the table.

The big winners in the bottom half of the Premier League last weekend were Wolves, whose 3-0 win against a predictably dismal Leicester City was their sixth in a row, lifting them to a nosebleed-inducing 13th place in the table. It’s their highest position of the season and begs the question of how much higher they might be able to get if they can hold onto their best players this summer.

And now come on, let’s all sit in a circle and admit this to each other: we all thought that Vitor Pareira was brought in solely because of a connection to Jorge Mendes and that they’d crash and burn, didn’t we? And we turned out to be wrong, didn’t we? It’s good for the soul to admit to having gotten things wrong. Cleansing. But is there any way in which they can continue this upward trajectory next season?

Finally at St Mary’s, Southampton led for almost an hour against Fulham before contriving to lose 2-1 regardless. Derby County finished the 2007/08 season with 11 points and a goal difference of -69. Nice. Southampton could equal, but they have fourteen goals to make up and only four games to do so. That’s a crumb of consolation for Saints supporters, but finishing above the worst team in the history of top flight football feels like a bit of a hollow victory, in the overall scheme of things.

The Championship automatic promotion places are already decided, so attention will turn to who fills its final two available playoff spots on the final day of the season. There remain three points between the five clubs chasing them. They’re currently held by Bristol City and Coventry City, but Coventry had an attack of the yips over the weekend and allowed those below them to close the gap, losing 1-0 at Luton, while Bristol City travel to second-placed Leeds United, who are already promoted but are still chasing Burnley for the title.

Millwall, Blackburn and Middlesbrough all remain in the chase, with the most curious of these being Blackburn, whose team is holding things together despite growing protests against the owners of the club, while the possibility of Millwall getting into the Premier League may cause its officials to looking towards some sort of contingency plan for next season. Only joking. Sheffield United will beat Coventry 3-1 in the playoff final after extra-time to secure a return to the top flight.

At the bottom of the table, Cardiff City are down—and now bottom of the table—after their dismal recent run continued with a goalless home draw against nothing to play for West Bromwich Albion. Plymouth join them in all but name. Admittedly, if other results go their way and they win their final game by 15 goals they could stay up, but this doesn’t seem very likely.

Luton’s win means that Hull City now occupy the final relegation spot after they lost the big game at the bottom of this weekend 1-0 at home to Derby County, but there are five teams—Hull, Luton, Preston North End, Derby and Stoke City—who could go down on the final day of the season. Hull’s final match is at Portsmouth next Sunday, and even a draw for them would leave the three clubs immediately above them needing to take something from their matches. I’ll likely get permutation-heavy about this later in the week.

League One’s automatic promotion places are also now sewn up after Wrexham won 3-0 against Charlton Athletic while Wycombe Wanderers were beaten at Leyton Orient. It’s a third successive promotion for Wrexham from the National League, the first time this has ever happened, but any residual feelings of this being a ‘fairytale’ of any description were long ago extinguished. They’ll need a lot of money to spend on the team if they’re to continue anything like that upward trajectory next season. Presumably that’ll be the main plot line for the next season of Welcome to Wrexham.

Orient’s win means that they hold onto the final playoff spot, ahead of Reading on goal difference. This produces mixed feelings. On one hand, the players and staff have done an incredible job of even keeping Reading in the game for a playoff place, considering the absolute disaster area that the club has been behind the scenes for the last few years.

But with Dai Yongge having still not sold the club and deadlines for him to do so again looming, there remains the possibility that they might not even be starting next season in the EFL, and something sticks in the craw about the owner of the club making more money back as a result of Reading getting promoted when Yongge has done nothing whatsoever to deserve this regardless.

At the bottom of League One, Cambridge United join Shrewsbury Town as mathematically relegated, while staying up is all but impossible for Bristol Rovers and Crawley Town. Rovers lost 2-0 at home to Reading, meaning that they would have to make up a fourteen goal difference and hope that Burton Albion lose their final match. The same goes for Crawley despite them beating Northampton Town 3-0.

As a division from which nobody seems to want to go up, League Two has been fascinating for a few weeks. But the top two have finally moved clear and secured their promotion places. Port Vale won 2-0 at Wimbledon and Doncaster Rovers beat Bradford 2-1 in the big match at the top of the table. But Bradford stay third because Walsall’s incredible choke continued with a 1-0 home defeat against Accrington Stanley. Notts County are still also in the chase following their 3-1 win at Harrogate.

The Notts match had ramifications at the other end of the table. Morecambe were already gone and lost 4-1 at Chesterfield, and they’ll be joined in the National League by Carlisle United, who lost 3-2 at Cheltenham while Accrington and Tranmere Rovers both won. Tranmere beat Crewe Alexandra 2-0 at Prenton Park and stay third from bottom, but at least they’re safe for another year.

They’ll be replaced by Barnet, who won the National League last week, and someone from the playoffs. The National League still has one game to play, with York City, Forest Green Rovers, Rochdale, Oldham Athletic and Halifax Town all having booked places in their six-team playoffs (how long do we think it’ll take before they’re extended to eight? Not long, I reckon), with the final place now being down to two clubs. Southend United currently occupy that final berth with Gateshead just behind them, but here’s the kicker; these two teams meet on Bank Holiday Monday for what is a straight shootout for the final play-off place. Southend need a draw, and Gateshead need a win.

At the other end of the table, well, Ebbsfleet were relegated in about October and Fylde joined them a couple of weeks ago, but there’s still space for two more. Dagenham & Redbridge clambered out of the bottom four with a surprisingly comprehensive 6-1 win against Altrincham and Boston United secured their safety with a 2-1 win against Gateshead and Maidenhead United kept themselves in the game—just—with a 2-0 win at Ebbsfleet. But Wealdstone lost at Southend and they now occupy the final relegation place. They will, as those of you who were paying attention on Saturday will already be aware, be replaced by Brackley Town, Truro City (both of whom will be making their National League debuts) and the winner of what seems likely to be some fascinating and chaotic playoff matches. Out with the old, in with the new indeed.