The Premier League - 2021-2022

Surprised as an Everton fan you’d hope City drop points, or are you just saying that they might from an objective viewpoint?

 

Talking to my mate yesterday - he said "I hope we don't get promoted next year" and we all know what he means. However, without that 'prize' what target for the season would exist? Here's my idea - any club gaining automatic promotion could auction that promotion (with a reserve of, say, £60m) to the clubs in the playoffs. Then you could go for the glory of winning the division without the poisoned chalice of actually getting promoted.

 

Oh, I hope City win all of their last three games by 10 goals, but I look at those two away games and the defenders they're missing and I tend to think there's fairly big potential for some points dropped there

Liverpool have Southampton away, which is a bit of a gimme and an opportunity to close the small goal difference gap and Wolves at home on the final day, which they should win but Wolves are no mugs.

City being away to Wolves and West Ham feels like there's more scope for failure - I think Liverpool win both of their final games, it's just about whether City can make sure they drop no more than 2 points.

 

Personally I think that's silly. The aim is to cement yourselves as a Premier League club. I actually thought you'd done that a few years ago - Watford finished 11th (??) after 2 or 3 years of just staying above trouble and I thought that would be the point you'd kick on and entrench yourselves as a mid-table PL club. I'll confess I don't really remember how it all went wrong after that, but the point being that you were close to it. I can understand being downbeat after this season and how things have gone generally the last few years, but objectively you've proved that it *can* be done, it just requires some slightly better decision-making

 

Yes even I thought it was 60/40 which was as good as it got for me.

 

It was far more exciting when we were div 3 or 4 and could target promotion and further progression. As you say the reward for promotion next season would be another season of misery targetting 4th bottom. I guess the joy and excitement of a promotion season just about outweighs the misery of the year to follow ? Last promotion didn't as we didn't get to watch it live and experience the shared joy in the crowd which is what makes football what it is. If only least season had been the regular season and this season had been behind closed doors....

 

Is 'entrenching yourself as a mid-table club' something to be aspired to, though? To be a Palace or a Brighton?

 

We have nothing else to aspire to though in terms of league status. I agree it's not sexy.

 

It is, because it means you have a squad good enough to get to cup finals and maybe win the first major trophy in your entire history.

 

That depends greatly on your perspective

I see Brighton very much as what Watford could be - Brighton aren't a massive club, but they've built well, have a tremendous set-up behind the scenes, an incredible recruitment policy, play good football and have been slowly establishing themselves as a top flight team. They're at the point now that you'd have to say they've achieved that. No matter how this season turns out, I wouldn't be thinking of Brighton next season as a team likely to be battling the drop. In fact quite the opposite, I'd see them (with a couple of smart attacking additions) as the sort of club who are more likely than most to start to edge towards the European places.

It's a slow process, but it's possible to do it. It just needs good decisions and good infrastructure.

 

That went well.

 

It is better to have got to a final and lost in a world record humiliation than never to have lost in a world record humiliation at all.

Or something.

 

Without being snarky, I don't see how that is possibly less of something to aspire to than winning a lesser division. Cementing yourself in midtable means cementing your status in the top rank of football, financially and otherwise, with better players and coaches (theoretically), more visibility, and just as much if not more chance (not much) of winning some kind of silverware eventually.

I doubt Brentford, for example, found this season miserable. We didn't need to find the past few seasons miserable, if it wasn't for Gino's brain falling out of his head at some point around mid-2019.

The most annoying thing about all of this is how unnecessary it was, and if we hadn't gone down in 2020, would we all be sitting here now lamenting our continued existence in the Premier League for a 7th and quite possibly 8th consecutive season?

 

Brighton have done amazingly well to get all those points against the top teams (12 points and only 2 defeats at the top 8, and after their humiliation of Man Utd last weekend taking points off all of them except City who are beating most teams - that’s a record we can only dream of) and hardly lose any away games until recently, and they’re remarkably resilient and in stark contrast to us seem to have a high level of fitness - the number of times they’ve got results through late goals plays a major part in their impressive away record. They also somehow manage to create a remarkable number of chances against almost all manner of teams, particularly away, much more so than other established smaller clubs like Palace, Burnley and even Southampton - I’m not sure how they do it because aside from Trossard and Bissouma, there isn’t a great quantity of quality players in their squad - how many would get into the teams above 15th, maybe Brentford apart? The fact is they’re punching well above their weight just by being in the top flight -are all their players even Premier League quality, and is it more excellent coaching and tactical organisation rather than a plethora of flair players that has got them where they are?

It does seem like their continued success depends on everything remaining tightly in place - the slightest defect in structure, like injuries or sales of key players, any drop in motivation or confidence, or fallings out between the players that have come together and formed this great team spirit (like what likely happened with us in 2019), and of course the departure of Potter to, say, a bigger club, could result in a big plummet down the table. Even this season they’ve shown their limitation and fragilities (poor home form, sometimes struggle to finish opponents off, an 11-game winless run and a six-game losing streak) that could get further exposed if any of the above does happen.

 

All of their favoured centre backs would get into teams above 15th, and are certainly 'Premier League players'. Lamptey also certainly earns that accolade, as would Cucurella, in most fans' opinion, I imagine.

 

Leeds doing their absolute best to get themselves relegated, another awful challenge. These players must be thick as ****.

 

Leeds looking like relegation fodder. Really poor and a stupid challenge for the red.

 

Main result from tonight is Norwich losing again. Thankfully they're determined that we won't beat them to 20th place.

 

Norwich should have stuck with that rapey looking manager they had.

 

Norwich are currently on course (if they don’t get anymore points) to get the same amount of points they were relegated on in 19/20. So after an initial new manager bounce with Dean Smith they’ve ended up just as bad, so yeah in hindsight they may as well have kept Farke because at least he’s an almost certain guarantee of promotion again. It’s probably more just a case of being in the same boat as us, a squad so bad that it doesn’t really matter who the manager is, but I don’t think Smith is a great manager and the answer is probably somewhere in the middle (probably like us), i.e. someone who isn’t either Farke or Smith probably could’ve got them more points but probably still couldn’t have kept them up.

It’s way more damning on us considering our 5 consecutive years in the Prem, and the fact that we do spend money (£12m to agents no less) and hire and fire managers in a desperate attempt to stay in the Prem, yet we can now barely manage more points than than the team who wrote the book on yo-yoing. Although they spent a bit more this season they also lost their star player, unlike us whose star player just turned into a lump of dog ****.

All in all despite the best efforts of the brains trust in charge we have achieved no more than a team who essentially bend over and accept their shafting every other year without any effort to avoid it. Whatever Gino has done to keep the club up he was basically better off just not doing anything at all and we would’ve got the same result.

 

Been giving this a lot of thought lately and in reality we just got lucky and over performed for a few years. We're about the poorest club in the top flight with zero chance compared with 14 of them financially.
GP is just a business man, no huge wealth and thinks he knows what he's doing because he got some grounding from his father.
Buying overpriced unproven players whilst throwing many millions at overpriced youngsters is crazy if you run a football club, it's tantamount to gambling all your money away.
And so that's us, we're where we belong, until GP can start running our club as a proper football club, and possibly bring us some good times along the way....
Next few months will be very telling....

 

I was surprised to note that their defeat at Arsenal was the first time they'd dropped into the relegation zone this season (apart from one weekend when they weren't playing until Sunday when they won at Norwich to get back above Burnley). Really not a good time to be dropping into it, but they do have a couple of winnable games left - depends on how much Brighton & Brentford can be arsed...

 

The intellectual giants of the Premier League. Rebeccah is apparently the brains of that particular outfit.

Rooney's lawyer claims WhatsApp messages that would show the leaking of stories to the Sun are on a phone dropped off the side of a boat. He says it is now "lying at the bottom of sea in Davy Jones' locker". Vardy asks the court: "Who is Davy Jones?" The judge intervenes.

 

He was that guy in the Monkees wasn’t he? Ex racing jockey

 

Cheer up Peter Reid.

 

Oh, it makes me bleed
As a Watford believer
All this Premier League greed

 

Arsenal doing a Leeds and losing the plot

 

Alternative angle of Rob Holding’s block on Son:

 

It takes about 1.5 seconds of "reading" Jamie Vardy's Twitter to recognise he's a bit understaffed in the brainbox department.

 

Spurs will finish 4th. Told ya…

 

Clearly unfamiliar with the 90s and noughties former Southampton and Wolves manager