The last international break is over and we’re down to the final four of the FA Cup. The end of the season is in sight.
Who still has a point to prove, who’s got it all on the line, and what are going to be the big talking points for the last couple of months of the season? Massive, it is.
Liverpool, off the pitch more than on it
It should be a cruise to the Premier League title from here, especially with no other competitions to serve as a distraction.
Cracks have shown in Arne Slot’s side the longer the season has gone on, with their performances against PSG and Newcastle prompting particular concern. But the cracks are appearing too late to torpedo the top end of the Premier League table.
But they’ve still got those bloody contract talks to sort out. Even if Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk stay, leading chronometric scientists have confirmed they are indeed not getting any younger. And that’s to say nothing of Trent Alexander-Arnold’s massive potential departure.
Darwin Nunez is meanwhile not the standard required for a centre-forward, with the fun enjoyed at his expense going some way to let Diogo Jota off the hook for also having been largely rubbish since returning from injury.
That could leave Liverpool with a hell of a re-build to do this summer if they are to stay top of the pile next season. After an extremely slow pre-season transfer window last year, planning that now behind the scenes is going to be just as important as seeing the title out on the pitch.
MORE ON LIVERPOOL FROM F365…
👉 Liverpool receive £50m ‘formal offer’ for star as Nottingham Forest ‘want to close deal before summer’
👉 Alexander-Arnold ‘doesn’t understand’ Liverpool fan backlash, as Reds are to blame’ for exit scenario
👉 Overachieving Prem club plan record transfer for Liverpool man given Reds will snatch their star man
Mikel Arteta
It’s all about the Champions League for the Arsenal boss now with the Gunners virtual certainties to finish second in the Premier League again. A quarter-final clash with reigning champions Real Madrid provides a significant hurdle to Arteta claiming only his second major trophy as a manager following the 2020 FA Cup.
Dispensing with Real would only raise expectations on Arsenal to go all the way – but however things pan out in Europe, Arteta is at or approaching the point where the considerable goodwill he has rightly earned for restoring the club from mid-table obscurity starts to mean less and less.
The title race for this year is all but over, but the Gunners boss will be expected to show signs that his team can actually go on to top the table next season. They have very little to lose at this point; why not let the handbrake off and at least offer a bit of excitement?
Nottingham Forest
The absence of a real title race has left Forest’s rise from relegation battlers to strong Champions League hopefuls and FA Cup contenders as perhaps the story of the season so far – but there’s still time for a glorious season to become a glorious failure.
With the Premier League almost certain to get a fifth Champions League place for next season, Forest have the comfort of a six- or seven-point cushion (depending how Newcastle’s game in hand goes). Most clubs would feel confident in that position, but Forest fans have been pinching themselves since their early-season victory over Liverpool and still won’t believe they are about to return to European football’s top table until it’s mathematically confirmed.
Forest have the benefit of one of the kindest final run-ins in the division – the third-easiest on paper, by our calculations, behind only Manchester City and Wolves. Chelsea are the only side currently in the top eight left on Forest’s fixture list, and by the time they visit the City Ground on the final day, that game may well be irrelevant.
That just leaves Nuno Espirito Santo’s side to hold their nerve and keep doing what they have done all season, with their superb defence providing the main platform for their success so far. They should do it, but pressure can do funny things to a team.
The race for Europe
Even if we assume Forest do indeed see it through, that still leaves two more Champions League places up for grabs with just five points separating 4th from 10th.
Chelsea (49 points) currently occupy one of those spots, but have been in poor form since Christmas and have a particularly inhospitable final run-in.
That includes London derbies against Tottenham, Brentford and Fulham, and a final four games that reads Liverpool (h), Newcastle (a), Manchester United (h – yeah, alright) and Nottingham Forest (a). But we’ll come back to Chelsea a bit later…
5th-placed Manchester City (48 points) still don’t look their old selves, but have at least stopped losing every bloody week and have six bottom-half sides left on the agenda over their remaining nine games.
It’ll go down as a disappointing season for them either way, given the standards they have set for themselves, but they’d have gladly taken an FA Cup and Champions League qualification as consolation prizes if you’d offered them back in December, to say nothing of the silly but kind of fun-looking Club World Cup.
After their League Cup victory parties, Newcastle (47 points) must re-focus on the league, with a tricky spell against Villa, Brighton, Ipswich (yeah, alright), Chelsea and Arsenal towards the end of the season surely set to be where their fight is won or lost.
Brighton (47 points) have been resurgent after an awful run that came to a head with their 7-0 defeat to Nottingham Forest, and the next week is massive for them as they host Aston Villa in midweek before travelling to arch-rivals Crystal Palace at the weekend.
Then there’s Fulham (45 points), Aston Villa (45 points) and Bournemouth (44 points), all still in the race despite their recent inconsistency. All of them will need to start stringing results together again to stand a chance of claiming a European place (bar Villa, who still have routes available via the FA Cup and Champions League).
Fulham and Villa will need to be at their best over the next week to stay in it; the Cottagers face Arsenal and Liverpool next, while Villa take on Brighton and Forest.
Enzo Maresca
We’ll politely say the Chelsea manager’s style may be an acquired taste. There are plenty of Leicester and Chelsea fans who would simply say it can be boring as f***.
The Italian is able to make a case for himself about that when he is delivering results, but just like at the King Power Stadium last year, a blistering start to the season has given way to a decidedly crap run of form that now stands at just four wins in their past 13 Premier League games.
With Champions League qualification now in jeopardy and Chelsea not famed for giving their managers the benefit of the doubt (which has remained the case despite their change of ownership), these final few weeks of the season feel very do or die for Maresca. Even a Conference League title may not be enough to spare him from getting the chop before the Club World Cup gets under way.
Ruben Amorim
This season was always going to be a bit of a gimme for Ruben Amorim. If he did well, it was all Erik ten Hag’s fault that Manchester United were sh*t. If he didn’t, then the squad simply isn’t good enough to work under any manager. But even with that kind of generosity, it has been difficult to say the Portuguese has made an impact yet at Old Trafford.
A full pre-season should be a massive help, but they’re not going to be able to change all 25 players this summer, much as they might want to; some of his current squad are going to need to start delivering.
There have finally been some small but shaky signs of progress over the past few weeks, perhaps, and a tricky run-in that includes six of the current top-five hopefuls gives Amorim a chance to show they are fairly definitively a better outfit now than when he took over.
A good run in the Europa League would certainly do no harm, either, especially as winning it would come with a Champions League place that would be massively beneficial in the summer transfer market.
MORE ON MAN UTD FROM F365…
👉 Ten transfer requests welcomed by Premier League clubs ahead of the summer window
👉 Former team-mate shocked that Man Utd boss Amorim is a coach after being ‘the changing room clown’
👉 Man Utd face ‘major dilemma’ with Amorim ‘braced for record transfer bid’ for Fernandes
Tottenham in the Europa League
Same goes for Tottenham, of course.
Like Amorim, Ange Postecoglou is in a position to throw his heftiest weight behind those Thursday night fixtures. The Premier League is a write-off at this point anyway; who cares about the difference between finishing 11th and finishing 16th?
Aston Villa and Crystal Palace in the FA Cup
Even for a cup specialist like Unai Emery, winning the Champions League still currently feels like a mildly absurd proposition…though we’re not sure whether he would be encouraged or discouraged that PSG largely pummelled Liverpool but still needed penalties at the end of two legs to get the job done.
The FA Cup is very much on the table, however, with Villa arguably – and respectfully – getting the exact semi-final draw they would have wanted in spite of losing 4-1 to Crystal Palace just a few weeks ago, while Nottingham Forest face Manchester City.
Palace would have something to say about that, mind, especially after the agony of finishing as runners-up twice in living memory, back in 1990 and 2016 – and they don’t exactly have Villa’s undivided attention the same way Palace do in reverse.
Kieran McKenna
This writer gets very little right when it comes to pre-season predictions, but I am going to congratulate myself for having a hunch coming into this season that Kieran McKenna may not live up to the hype he generated by leading Ipswich to the now very rare and difficult feat of back-to-back promotions.
There’s no sense of emperor’s new clothes here, but the Tractor Boys had to win an awful lot of games from behind last season, with McKenna’s use of his bench and mid-game tweaks helping to overcome any accusations he had been getting it wrong to begin with.
We were impressed in the first half of the season with the fight that Ipswich consistently showed despite their awful results, but as the season comes towards its end, the Northern Irishman is starting to gain a few doubters – funnily enough, along much the same lines as our initial concerns.
It may be that that’s entirely unfair. The gap between the Premier League and Championship is absolutely enormous now, never mind trying to go from League One to competing in the top flight in such a short period. Southampton changed manager and remain just as bad, Leicester changed manager and got worse. Sometimes, a team is just not good enough.
Still, there is a risk that the sheen may come off a manager touted as a potential future Big Eight manager if Ipswich continue to go down with such a whimper. There’s no way they’re staying up, but bidding farewell to the Premier League with a scalp or two in their hands would help remove some of those emerging question marks about McKenna’s place in the managerial hierarchy.
Southampton
The worst Premier League side there has ever been at this stage of the season, with their nine points even outstripping Sunderland 2005/06 and Derby 2007/08 (both 10) for sheer awfulness.
Just three more points from the final nine games will ensure they are not quite as unbelievably awful as Derby were 17 years ago with their final 11-point…well, we’ll use the word ‘haul’ in the absence of a more suitable alternative. Go Saints!
The Championship promotion race
We once again have a three-way race for the two automatic promotion spots with just two points separating leaders Sheffield United from Leeds United and Burnley.
The play-off picture is similarly tight. Sunderland can start planning for the play-offs already: they are on an island all of their own in fourth place in an otherwise compact division.
But 5th and 6th is anyone’s guess. 5th-placed Coventry are just two points ahead of Bristol City in 8th, while everyone down to Millwall in 13th will still feel they have an outside chance if they can finish the season in brilliant form.
Frankly, if it were Sheffield United, Leeds and Burnley, it would be a bit boring (give us Coventry please). But at least it’s not going to be the same three that just went down; Luton are currently second from bottom and on course for League One.
Thomas Tuchel
His initial England squad looked like he had written it down 18 months ago and not changed it. Any chance he might take form into account over the next couple of months?
Probably not. But if he does…
Phil Foden, Cole Palmer and Morgan Gibbs-White
Between his roles for club and country, poor Phil Foden has played an unbelievable amount of football over the past five years, and it has finally started to show this season. The playmaker’s defence of last season’s player of the year awards has been one of the most unconvincing we’ve ever seen, bar a brief flurry of goals just after the new year.
Cole Palmer has succumbed to a similar kind of jadedness after his breakthrough season last term, with no goals in his past 10 appearances in all competitions going back to mid-January. We have to agree with Maresca that the minor hamstring injury that forced/allowed Palmer to pull out of England duty might actually do him some good.
And then, at the other end of the scale altogether, is Morgan Gibbs-White: in brilliant form for his club, but initially overlooked by Tuchel. The Forest midfielder will be desperate to make himself actually irresistible before England return to action in June.
Marcus Rashford
Currently undergoing a renaissance at Aston Villa, and presumably would welcome the club taking up the option to make that move permanent.
At the moment that looks a no-brainer; if he keeps his nose clean and keeps chipping in with goals and assists, Villa would surely snap Manchester United’s hand off this summer.
