Liverpool lost when it no longer mattered as, in a way, did Southampton. Meanwhile, Fulham, Villa, Wolves and very grudgingly Spurs take their places in the winners’ circle.
Winners
Aston Villa
Could have been forgiven for taking their eye slightly off the boil ahead of a Champions League quarter-final trip to Paris but, whatever strife they’ve had trying to balance domestic and continental action after European games, there was no evidence of that before the biggest one of the lot.
A 15-minute blitz took Villa into a commanding two-goal lead that Forest could not claw back despite a much-improved second-half showing after they’d abandoned a disastrous back-five experiment that left an entire defence lost and confused and entirely unsure who was marking who, if indeed anyone was marking anyone at all. Man United can relate, at least.
A fine Saturday for Villa became an even better weekend, with Chelsea and Man City each picking up only a single point to keep Unai Emery’s team in with a very real chance of another crack at the Big Cup even in the unlikely event they don’t win it this season.
The January transfer window was an obvious difference-maker for Villa, and only Liverpool have more Premier League points since it closed, confusingly, in February.
It’s a climax to the season alive with possibility on three fronts for an in-form Villa. But they really might live to rue that terrible goal difference.
Fulham
There’s plenty of debate currently about whether the Premier League this season has been good or bad. We are firmly in the ‘bad’ camp, not because we’re here to have a pop at anyone but because on a fundamental level when you know for sure who’s going to win the league and which three teams are getting relegated with about a third of the season left to play as we did this campaign, that is Not Good.
What we will accept is the argument that in the round there has been perhaps a levelling rather than drop in quality. Some big teams have got hilariously worse, while the Premier League’s ‘middle class’, pockets bulging from TV riches, have been able to pounce on the folly of those bigger teams and close all the gaps.
So while we have a runaway leader and cast-adrift bottom three, there has perhaps never been a smaller quality gap between second and 17th. The combined gaps between first and second and 17th and 18th now stand at 23 points. The points-span covering absolutely everyone who isn’t going to win the league or go down is only 30.
And absolutely nobody better sums up this idea of a 16-team mid-table than Fulham, who are a very good team indeed to sit roughly in the middle of this season’s Middle 16 but have got themselves there in the oddest of fashions.
What Fulham have essentially achieved is to render the opposition meaningless. It makes almost no statistically significant difference who Fulham are playing, or indeed where they are playing them.
This is a team that has taken four points off Liverpool but only three off Ipswich and Southampton combined. They have lost 4-1 at home Wolves, yet won at Chelsea and Newcastle.
They had bits of this egalitarian approach in place last season, where they took four points from Arsenal but one from Burnley.
But they’ve perfected it this year. Most pleasingly, their 48 Premier League points are split down the middle between those won against teams in the top half and those in the bottom half. They’ve got 26 home points and 22 away.
Their longest winning run in the league this year is two games, as is their longest losing streak. They did at one point draw three games in a row, yet even then they merely proved the general thrust of what we’re saying here because those three draws came against Arsenal, Liverpool and… Southampton.
Wolves
The relegation battle briefly flickered back into life when Ipswich were still leading Wolves 1-0 deep into the second half.
There was a very real prospect of a 12-point gap being cut in half in just four days, and that would inevitably have set arseholes twitching even if in all likelihood Wolves would still have been fine.
Two late goals later, and the relegation battle is once again deceased. Bereft of life, it rests in peace.
But having now surely secured survival, the big question now is where Wolves go from here? They have a smattering of really quite wonderful players for a team in 17th and a manager who is starting to get a tune out of them relatively consistently.
Nobody has more points than Wolves’ 13 across the last six games. They always did look the odd one out when there was a clear bottom four; in the short term they could yet spend the rest of this season proving themselves still the odd one out among their new table neighbours Spurs, West Ham, Everton and Man United. It’s a distracted Spurs at home next for a team that can now play with absolute freedom.
But our minds start to wander to next season and what kind of Nottingham Forest-style freakery we might get from a midlands-based team, reinvigorated by the mid-season arrival of a Portuguese manager and surviving a pretty serious flirt with relegation.
Tottenham
Avoided the embarrassment of the Spursiest hat-trick ever as Southampton failed to add their names to Ipswich and Leicester among the litany of teams to have won at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium this season.
Spurs were far from convincing in a 3-1 win over the now-relegated Saints, and did nothing to suggest they are a team about to pull a season-saving Europa League triumph out of their arses, yet beggars cannot be choosers and for this version of Spurs a win is a win is a win.
But this is a broken team under a broken manager, whose complaints against VAR remain as valid as ever but have assumed the distinct position of crutch, something crowd-pleasing to focus on instead of the fact that the injury crisis has ended with no tangible improvement in Spurs’ performances or results, and perhaps worse still the growing signs that even the misguided purity of Angeball has been fatally compromised.
Still, at least when he’s making pointed hand gestures about VAR he isn’t attempting to gaslight an entire fanbase.
Spurs sent Southampton down on Sunday, but there remains an alarmingly real prospect for someone to do likewise to Spurs next season unless something changes.
A glance at Spurs’ recent results and seven remaining fixtures gives a non-zero chance that this was their final win of the season. We fully expect that sometime around the October international break we’ll be saying things like ‘Spurs haven’t beaten a current Premier League team since February’.
Here endeth the gloomiest ever entry in the ‘winners’ section.
Brennan Johnson
We remain quite sure he’s nothing more than a Temu Raheem Sterling, but he’s played himself right into contention for Tottenham’s season-defining games over the next couple of Thursdays after scoring his 10th and 11th league goals of the season.
It’s more Premier League goals than Luis Diaz or Raul Jimenez or Evanilson or Kai Havertz or Nicolas Jackson or Bruno Fernandes or Jarrod Bowen or Cody Gakpo or Phil Foden or indeed any other Spurs player has managed this season.
It’s not nothing.
Ange Postecoglou
Prompting the same club to sack two managers in the same season, you’ll never sing that.
Crystal Palace
Secured a rare Premier League double over A23 rivals Brighton to put the midweek blip against Southampton behind them and, as well as moving within seven points of their first ever 50-point Premier League season, have now positioned themselves such that a win over Newcastle in their game in hand next week could lift them right into European contention.
READ MORE: Champions League-chasing FA Cup rivals Palace and Villa behind only Barca and PSG in European form table
Newcastle
Not normal to find yourselves in the winners’ enclosure on a weekend where you don’t even have a game, but these are not normal times for the Carabao Cup winners.
A lovely bunch of weekend results in which the only team now above Newcastle to win was Aston Villa, who beat another team above them anyway, sets the Magpies up beautifully to add Champions League qualification to that long-craved silverware.
If Eddie Howe’s side can take care of business in their three games over the next 10 days against Leicester (straightforward), Man United (ditto) and Palace (admittedly less straightforward) they will be sniffing a shot at third place, never mind merely scrambling their way to fifth.
Losers
Southampton
A long-certain relegation now rubber-stamped in record time with an awkward-looking road back, and the final nail hammered home by a half-baked and half-arsed Spurs team that only very briefly appeared in any real danger of Spursing themselves in this one.
The relegation isn’t even the worst thing. That’s been coming for months, now. Spurs’ current navel-gazing uncertain miserabilism meant this was one of Southampton’s more plausible routes past 11 points. It now seems like it’s all eyes on Leicester next month.
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Aaron Ramsdale
Three relegations with three different clubs in six years.
Ipswich
Fitting really that Ipswich’s own relegation was effectively confirmed in a home game that promised much but in the end delivered only more disappointment.
It’s not just that Ipswich have managed only seven home points all season – although it is also definitely that – but the fact those points haven’t even come in the most decisive fixtures.
Beating Chelsea is lovely and very good, well done for that, but it’s an absurd win to have as your only one at home all season.
Ipswich have now emerged with a solitary point from their three six-pointer home games against the teams who have spent most of this season in their orbit while also being thrashed by Tottenham and well beaten by Everton back when things felt decidedly bleaker in the blue half of Liverpool.
Liverpool
Look, if you’re going to look completely knackered and newly short on ideas about what to do about that, then do so when you’re 11 points clear with seven games to play of a pursuer who absolutely cannot be trusted to pounce even if you do completely collapse in a shattered heap.
Nothing is f*cked. It’s going to be okay. Liverpool are still going to win the league. But there’s also no doubt that the season is ending in a weird fashion for them.
In the space of four games around the international break, Liverpool have seen two clear routes to silverware end and now suffered a first Premier League defeat in a game they’ve led since the 2022/23 season.
Given that formidable record under both Klopp and Slot of pressing home any advantage, the sight of Fulham turning a 1-0 deficit into a 3-1 lead across 14 error-strewn first-half minutes has to be cause for longer-term alarm.
The futures of the Contract Three are a big factor in why these Liverpool foundations suddenly feel so fragile, but not the only one as the sense grows that even with a new manager this season has represented the last hurrah of something brilliant rather than the exciting start of a new cycle.
The Contract Three
Trent Alexander-Arnold is injured, Virgil van Dijk is making wholly uncharacteristic errors surely born of utter exhaustion, while Mo Salah has stopped producing anything much at all after months and months of goal-and-assist numbers never before seen in the Premier League.
Van Dijk looks alarmingly attackable at the moment, with Fulham really doing nothing more this weekend than finishing what Beto had started in midweek.
Salah won only one of his eight duels against Fulham, while two of the (still ludicrously low) six Premier League games in which he’s contributed neither a goal nor an assist have now happened in the last five days.
Nottingham Forest
Seems churlish and is churlish to criticise pretty much anything Forest have done this season, but if they were to end up missing out on Champions League qualification at the end of this season they may look back with particular rue on the decision to start with a back five at Villa Park.
By the time Nuno and the lads were able to correct a decision that had played a huge part in Villa racing into a 2-0 lead inside 15 minutes, Forest had left themselves too much to do.
They were the better side by miles in the second half at Villa, but missed a string of chances and, with only Jota Silva’s goal to show for their efforts, have missed an opportunity not only to cement their own top-five standing but put a significant dent in Villa’s chances.
The draws elsewhere for Chelsea and Man City mitigate the impact to a pretty significant extent, but also only exacerbate the feeling of a squandered chance against a Villa side who were always going to have to hedge their bets to some extent between Saturday’s game and the upcoming trip to Paris.
A narrow defeat at a team as good as Villa shouldn’t be the one that defines any season, but the largely self-inflicted nature of it at such a pivotal time of the season leaves a definite sting.
Manchester
The drabbest, most sorrowful of derbies between a United side in genuine danger of finishing below even Spurs and a City one now likely to find themselves outside even the expanded Champions League spots by the morning.
We’ve already managed to put together far more words than is sensible or necessary on a game of such utter drudgery, and you will get no fresh ones here. You can’t make us.
Brighton
The international break can be a burden for all, but there’s nearly always a team for whom it comes as a complete season-wrecking momentum killer. This year, that team appears to be Brighton.
Before the international break they were enjoying a seven-game unbeaten run that included FA Cup successes against both Chelsea and Newcastle and a march towards Champions League contention in the league.
Since the international break they have scored one goal in 300 minutes of football, gone out of the FA Cup and lost back-to-back league games against Villa and Palace to drop back into the mid-table pack.
The good news is that at least it’s Leicester up next.
Bournemouth
Now find themselves inside the bottom three on the form table. Takes something special to do that this season of all seasons, but especially when that two-points-from-six-games collapse comes on the back of a run of eight wins and four draws in the previous 13.
Chelsea
On December 8, Chelsea beat Spurs 4-3 at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
In eight Premier League away games combined since that nonsense they’ve cobbled together exactly the same number of points and scored fewer goals.
The fact they are still seemingly heading for the Champions League despite themselves is a black mark against every single team currently below them in the table.
