We’re struggling to remember a time during the Big Six Era when all of those six teams find themselves feeling at least a little bit sh*t about something. While only three of them might currently be in outright sirens-and-alarms CRISIS, the other three all feel like it could go that way for them at any moment.
Which obviously is great news for everyone, and also the absolutely ideal time for a bit of Mood Ranking.
If you want to discover just how very long ago December really was, you can check out the last Mood Rankings update here or just enjoy the wrongness in more abbreviated form by looking at the numbers in brackets below.
20) Tottenham (17)
A stupid club with stupid players and a stupid manager playing stupid football stupidly.
They 100 per cent deserve to get relegated and it is to the Premier League’s unending shame that big clubs are so sufficiently sheltered from the consequences of their own actions in Our League that this (almost certainly) won’t happen.
We don’t want to hear any nonsense about the injury crisis and bad luck. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Ange Postecoglou is the injury crisis. It turns out there was a reason after all why his brand of relentless non-stop running in all directions at all times hadn’t been attempted in a proper big-boy league before. It’s because it turns out that it’s entirely unsustainable if you can’t half-ass it through 62% of your league fixtures.
Spurs have had to use their whole ass. And it’s showing. Getting knocked out of two cups in four days is, if anything, almost too Spurs-coded for me, Clive.
It remains hilariously possible that Spurs, with little else to play for, somehow end this season winning the Europa League and qualifying for the Champions League. If they do, there will be a legitimate argument that this therefore represents the club’s best season since the 1960s.
There is even still the admittedly minuscule but non-zero chance that they win the Europa League and get relegated, which when you actually stop and think about it feels truly like the only possible on-brand way Spurs’ trophy drought could ever actually come to an end.
Far more likely an outcome is that they go out to Galatasaray in the last 16, limp home 14th in the league and start another painful and doomed-to-failure reboot in the summer.
Let us end this section before we get any more annoyed by their ridiculousness with a new occasional feature we’ve just invented called ‘Football facts that don’t feel like they can possibly be true’.
Here goes: Spurs won their most recent Premier League game. And another one, whether you want it or not: Spurs’ leading Premier League goalscorer this season is James Maddison.
19) Leicester (10)
Sinking without trace under a rookie manager and now without even the distraction of a cup run or a game against Spurs to lift the gloom.
Although they currently sit above Ipswich in the Premier League table, our suspicion is that it will be the Foxes who are first to join Southampton in Doomed Town, even though all three probably will sink straight back down whence they came when the dust finally settles.
When you find yourself getting absolutely battered by Everton, no matter how rejuvenated by the sight of David Moyes they may be, it is time to ask serious questions about what you’re playing at.
The frustration for whoever goes down this year is going to be the knowledge that this was in the end a very survivable Premier League season given just how bad Wolves and some of the bigger beasts have been.
Wolves are currently on track to survive – and with a bit to spare – on just 30 points. There really is no excuse now for Leicester and Ipswich not to make at least them and still maybe some of the flighty teams directly above them sweat over the months ahead.
But with Leicester we just really don’t think they have it in them. Unless there is a way to fill Jamie Vardy with so much Red Bull that you can convince his addled mind that every game is in fact against Spurs.
18) Manchester City (15)
Just feels very much like something very special is coming to a very, very grisly end, and that’s even if we put all the 115 charges stuff to one side and focus only on what’s happening right now on the pitch.
A team that dominated an era with football that delivered suffocating, near total control of events now simply cannot be trusted in almost any situation. They cannot defend a lead and they cannot prevent a defeat becoming a twatting.
They are, judged as they must harshly be by the standards they have set over many years, just quite sh*t.
The late collapses just keep happening against teams of every calibre. Feyenoord, Man United, Brentford, PSG, Real Madrid. The mortifying thrashings from both the good and the bad sides of north London.
There is a sudden and real lack of identity and cohesion about a side and coach for whom that has always been such a cornerstone.
They just right now do not really do anything well enough consistently enough. Sure, they’ll wheel out the odd 6-0 thrashing here and there when it all comes together against some poor sod or other, but you just don’t get any sense at all that City are anywhere close to going on one of their second-half-of-the-season rampages.
City are fortunate, really, to have thrown in this particular season at a time when the Big Six itself is falling apart. They will still most likely end up in the Champions League at the end of it. You can’t even fully discount the idea they might finish second, which would be objectively hilarious.
But for really the first time under Guardiola, City’s road on the field looks as uncertain as it does off the field. Order has given way to chaos and where it all ends now is anyone’s guess.
READ: Eleven Man City players Pep Guardiola should look to upgrade this summer
17) Wolves (19)
The side for whom it appears most conspicuously careless and frustrating to still be stuck right there in the group of four at the foot of the table.
Partly because the other three are the promoted sides and thus sitting precisely where everyone, themselves included, expected to sit, but partly because Wolves really do just fundamentally look the best equipped to have saved themselves by now.
Gut feel is still probably that they will be fine. Their goal difference is so much better than those below them that they do now have effectively a three-point cushion over the bottom three.
But there is a frustration that they haven’t ever quite managed to ease clear of the dregs in the way, say, Everton or even West Ham have.
What we’ve decided is that you need a run of three wins in relatively quick order to get clear of the relegation scrap, and Wolves have never done it. They’re quite good at two wins, but have not yet located the third that sorts it out more compellingly.
They won back-to-back games against Southampton and Fulham in November, and then did it again against Leicester and Man United at Christmas. But they managed just one point from the other nine games since those November successes.
That’s irritating: Wolves have shown – twice – that they are capable of extricating themselves but without actually extricating themselves.
The good news is that they’ve had another win now, cashing in nicely on a post-Champions League Aston Villa, but the bad news is that their next two games are away at Liverpool and Bournemouth.
So they are probably going to have to wait for spring and a run of games against the teams immediately above and below them to get out of dodge: Everton, Southampton, West Ham, Ipswich. Tottenham, Man United, Leicester.
Of course, that is also a run of games that could get them into some very deep sh*t indeed if it goes the other way.
What we’re saying here is by the next moods update Wolves are either going to be about 10th or compellingly rock bottom.
16) Manchester United (16)
We are trying and failing to think of anything bleaker in the entire world than the only possible flimsy positive to take from your 2024/25 season is that it’s arguably not quite as abysmal as Tottenham’s.
And even then, the case isn’t particularly compelling. Lose at White Hart Lane 2.0 on the weekend as United very well might – frankly who knows what f*cking nonsense awaits us in that clash between movable object and stoppable force – and they’ll be back below Spurs in the league and with work still to do to avoid being sucked right into the thick of a relegation battle.
The other thing that makes United’s situation arguably grimmer than Spurs’ is that they’ve already pressed the big red New Manager Bounce button and it’s turned out to have made them much, much worse as a new manager tries to implement a new system with a squad not ready for that kind of challenge on a technical, temperamental, physical or emotional level.
At least with Spurs there’s the promise of yet another new start offering some temporary lifting of the gloom at the start of next season before it all goes inevitably and hilariously to sh*t again. What are United going to do? They can’t bin Amorim at this time, and their surely aren’t enough of the little people left for Scrooge McRatcliffe to sack in order to bankroll the spending that will be required to turn this squad into a halfway viable one for Amorim’s dynamic 3-4-3. So on they will drift.
And this season can definitely still get even worse than it already is, too.
Manchester United defeats have become so commonplace that they quite often now barely even register. Here’s a test for you neutrals: what was the result of Manchester United’s last Premier League game?
See? Having to think about it aren’t you? It was a 2-0 home defeat to Crystal Palace. With all due respect to Crystal Palace, something has gone so very badly wrong when This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About can lose 2-0 at home to the Eagles and the collective response of the wider English football world is to glance over, shrug the shoulders, and get back to debating whether or not Myles Lewis-Skelly should be sent to the Tower of London for celebrating a goal.
Hated, adored, and now quite frequently ignored. As Oscar Wilde so famously put it: there’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s being f*cked to death by a bear.
15) Ipswich (11)
Still in there competing, but the awkward truth is that Ipswich not being cut adrift owes more currently to the ineptitude of those around them than their own efforts having lost four league games in a row. Defeats to Man City and Liverpool, albeit hefty, can be cheerfully written off as of no consequence but losing at home to Southampton cannot. That is a mood killer if ever there was one.
Even their next two games are now harder tasks than they might have been, with Villa away this weekend and Tottenham at home in a six-pointer the next. In another universe, both those games would be taking place after those teams faced European play-off action, and both those teams are complete turd after European action.
There is some comfort for the Tractor Boys in the fact that Spurs are complete turd regardless, but still.
At the start of the season it would have been a damn fool who predicted Nottingham Forest as the toughest test of a run that also features Villa, Spurs and Man United but that is Ipswich’s reality and the hard truth is that they surely do need to bank a meaningful number of points from that run to remain in meaningful contact with 17th place.
14) Southampton (20)
There’s an awful lot to be said for the sweet release of just no longer giving a f*ck. Once your fate is sealed, at least you can relax a bit. When relegation is a surefire racing certainty why continue stressing about it?
What we’re saying here is that if you’re going to end up getting relegated anyway then the Southampton/Norwich/Sheffield United way of being adrift and doomed by mid-season is a far better way of going about it than any kind of agonising last-day despair. Hope remains the very cruellest of emotions, in football as in life.
Southampton are f*cked, Southampton know they are f*cked, Southampton have come to terms with the fact they are f*cked and are already planning for next season.
And under Ivan Juric they’ve even started playing a bit better as well. Gone are the self-serving, team-destroying Kompany-lite kamikaze-ball stylings of Russell Martin, to be replaced by something that is starting to look at times deceptively like competence.
Sometimes, fleetingly, it’s even quite entertaining. And with the recent win at Ipswich meaning they should now avoid the ignominy of knocking Derby off their f*cking perch as the Premier League’s worst ever team, Southampton are now weirdly free to just approach the rest of the season in counter-intuitively carefree fashion, knowing their own ending but enjoying the chance to meddle and interfere in those whose reward for being a bit less sh*t is stress and hassle.
In conclusion: life isn’t fair.
13) West Ham (14)
Definitely feels like they do now have a manager who can be a bit more West Ham about things.
It’s only tentatively positive at this stage, because they haven’t enjoyed the springiest of New Manager Bounces under a manager who has his own points to prove and could do with that boost just as much as his new club.
There isn’t really any longer a viable route that turns this into a good season for West Ham, but there is clearly potential for this one to end in such a way that optimism for the future might be tentatively encouraged.
And in the short term they should be fine because if nothing else they do appear at the very least to be less overtly self-defeatingly stupid than the two bigger clubs with whom they currently share slightly dicey lower-mid-table real estate.
Finishing above one or other of those two dafties should be within the Hammers’ compass, you’d think, and that would mean something. Especially if it’s Spurs, given the enmity that exists between them.
That’s fine for now, but next season we will be asking to see West Ham do something to succeed on their own terms rather than relatively in comparison to a pair of massive idiots.
12) Chelsea (2)
December was a long, long time ago for some clubs. Chelsea were title contenders back then, even though Enzo Maresca was at the time desperately trying to explain to us that actually they weren’t.
Maybe we should have listened. Because poor old Enzo got so ruffled by everyone refusing to listen to him that he had no choice but to show everyone Chelsea are not in fact title contenders. And how.
Chelsea have now overegged that particular pudding that even European qualification – never mind Champions League qualification – is no longer secure.
And having successfully talked himself out of the title race, Maresca’s next trick has been to try and spin the positives from an FA Cup exit in which there were none. The chance to concentrate on finishing fourth – which should have been a given – and winning the Conference League – something Chelsea’s expensively-assembled reserves appear entirely capable of doing while spinning on their cocks – is not the positive Maresca wants us all to think it is.
It’s just all a bit small-time and for the first time this season has people thinking their first assessment of Chelsea’s managerial change of direction in the summer might have been the correct one.
11) Brighton (9)
We like Brighton, but they can be a little bit Brighton. They’re just doing their season again, aren’t they?
Which is fine, to an extent, because Brighton’s standard season is a pretty solid one that involves a few really great standout performances and results and ends with them safely tucked away in the top half of the Premier League.
We’re not giving lots away by saying that this being Brighton’s standard season is a very recent phenomenon.
But it’s still a frustrating one, because they go about it the same way every time and, we would humbly contend, the wrong way.
If you’re going to end up somewhere between about eighth and tenth – which again, is absolutely fine – then don’t do it by being third for August and September and just slowly kind of drifting and shrinking away into nothing.
Be rubbish at the start of the season and brilliant at the end. At least in some of the seasons. It’s more exciting that way.
And in fairness, Brighton did extend the ‘being good’ part of the season as far as November this time around before taking what is in our opinion a poor decision to just draw pretty much every game after that.
But even that was a better policy than the ‘losing 7-0 at Nottingham Forest’ one.
No getting away from the fact that ‘two Premier League wins since the start of December’ is just far too uncomfortably Brighton, and, barring them pulling off a mischief in the FA Cup, it’s just a bit same old, same old.
10) Fulham (8)
One word to describe Fulham’s season this year would be ‘invisible’. We humbly contend that they have been the Premier League’s least noticeable team this year, and that it is also not the first time this has happened.
Not last year, mind. Sure, last year they were extremely mid-table, as Fulham are wont to be, but they went about it in quite a novel and exciting way. Like, they would suddenly just win 5-0 twice in four days for a laugh, or take four points off Arsenal, or struggle against Sheffield United and Burnley. That kind of thing – keep everyone guessing.
This year, however, they’ve just sort of pootled along without ever being in anything that could remotely be described as good or bad form. They’ve just been… there.
Look, we’re not knocking it. There are several far better resourced teams who’d bloody love to have 36 points – a total that still puts them just a single point behind Aston Villa.
But you must remember this is the Mood Rankings. And the Mood Rankings algorithm, while rigorous and very definitely a real thing that exists, is also all about vibes.
And if you’re honest with yourself, does it feel like Fulham are just one point behind Aston Villa? Obviously not.
Because there’s just never enough about them to latch on to. This is what we mean, right?
Fulham’s longest winning run this season? Two games.
Fulham’s longest losing run? Two games.
Longest run without a win? Three games – and of the nine games that comprise the three such runs they’ve had this season they drew six.
And six is also the number of draws that meant absolutely not one human on earth noticed they were on an eight-match unbeaten run before losing at West Ham last month.
They neither score nor concede an eye-catching quantity of goals, and literally the only surprise about them is that their 24 games haven’t in fact produced eight wins, eight draws and eight defeats.
9) Crystal Palace (13)
Their deeply troubling start to the season now a thing of the past, its only lingering frustration the likelihood that it has once again condemned Palace to a Groundhog Day 40-something season when the team and manager are clearly good enough to lift Palace into the dizzy, giddy heights of 50-something points.
That promise is at least now being delivered on the pitch, with Palace now boasting one of the more sensible formlines among a very silly collection of clubs in the bottom half of the table. After losing five of their first eight they have now lost just three of their last 16 in the Premier League to saunter to the comforting familiarity of mid-table safety.
Then there’s the FA Cup. Palace are far from alone in looking at the possibilities opening up for them there, but few seem better placed to capitalise. A home tie with Millwall is all that stands between Palace and Millwall, and there aren’t many others left in the competition now who have the same combination of encouraging current form and lack of other competing objectives. Unless you count trying to get 50 points, which you probably should but Palace’s actual players probably don’t.
READ: Remaining Premier League clubs ranked by how much they need FA Cup glory
8) Everton (18)
Everton look happier than they have in years. David Moyes looks happier than he has in years. Sometimes it’s just nice to see something nice happen, isn’t it?
Everton were stumbling aimlessly, guilelessly and above all boringly towards a complete disaster under Sean Dyche. The nuclear banterpocalypse option of their first season at a shiny new ground also being their first outside the top flight in about a million years had become nightmarishly, horribly real.
They were rubbish and only getting more rubbish, Dyche having responded to Everton’s struggles by trying to be even more Dyche about it. Sure, they stopped conceding quite so many goals but at the expense of also never scoring any goals.
They have now scored 10 goals and secured 10 points in their last four league games. For context, the previous 12 league games had produced a yield of six goals and nine points.
Everton were already sure of being a significant moods climber even before pieing Liverpool off so magnificently in the final ever Goodison Park Derby.
The scenes after James Tarkowski’s spectacular equaliser were utterly magnificent. There has perhaps never been a clearer example of just how much ‘Actually, these are scenes everyone wants to see!’ has become even more of a cliché than ‘Scenes nobody wants to see’ ever was.
Sure, some may argue that actually winning would have been better, but rattling your biggest rivals into the quantum realm is better than any three points ever could be. They’ve sent Liverpool fans Full Arsenal, and there are few more delicious feelings than that.
Although imagine if there actually are two opposing conspiracies lurking deep within the Premier League, PGMOL and FA, one trying to deliver the title to Liverpool and one trying to deliver it to Arsenal? What then?
7) Brentford (7)
Absolutely no getting away from the fact that spending the first half of the season getting all your points at home and absolutely none of them away and then spending the second half of the season flipping that on its head is a sensational bit.
Long may it continue, and if you’re in any doubt about Brentford’s commitment to the bit then the fact it even required them to lose at home to Spurs should ease your troubles.
It is far from the first time we’ve covered this but let’s go over the numbers just one more time because they are tremendous fun.
In Brentford’s first eight home league games of the season, they won seven and drew one. In that time they also decided to score 26 goals and concede 15.
In their five subsequent home games, they’ve drawn once and lost four while scoring just three goals and conceding 11. And they also chucked in a home FA Cup defeat to Plymouth for good measure.
Away from home, Brentford collected just a solitary point from their first eight games in which they managed to score just seven goals. They have taken seven points from the last three away games, while scoring another seven goals.
This is an absolutely first-rate way to about finishing mid-table. Fulham take note.
6) Arsenal (4)
We remain endlessly fascinated by Arsenal. There might on occasion be a more interesting football team, but very, very rarely a more interesting club.
Arsenal is a place of extremes. From the outside it just looks utterly exhausting. They permanently occupy one of two states: imminent world domination, and imminent falling in of the entire f*cking sky. There is no in between. Things at Arsenal are never just fine.
It goes some way, we think, to explaining the Celebration Police phenomenon, and also The Conspiracy. It’s been noted before by sager observers than us that every Arsenal game has about it the feel of a cup final. Arsenal are permanently living on the edge. Every win is a seismic moment, every defeat – or even draw – an unprecedented disaster from which there is no hope of recovery. Until the next win, and the cycle begins again.
When you view every match as a cup final, you’re going to celebrate every win like a cup final. When every draw is a catastrophe, the tinfoil hats will never be far away.
And it’s not just about things as mundane as results of football matches. Oh, dear me, no. It’s everything. The Kai Havertz news cycle of the last few weeks is just perfectly and magnificently Arsenal.
His journey has taken him from being a bottleless fraud of a striker, a player considered such fair game for ridicule that he even got pelters for putting a goal on a plate for Martin Odegaard in a match that would have been a big deal even at other, less batsh*t clubs.
When Havertz then became the first player in the history of football to miss a good chance, all hell broke loose, to the extent that not even him subsequently scoring a very good goal could shift the needle on his accepted and proven ineptitude. Had it not been for Myles Lewis-Skelly celebrating a goal, it’s likely Havertz would have been the main talking point even after a 5-1 win.
Insanity.
And now, of course, he is injured. Scoring and assisting goals couldn’t shift the narrative around him, but getting injured certainly could. Now he is no longer a fraud. Now he is a key player, an irreplaceable player, his absence a nightmare hammer injury blow setback catastrophe.
The very idea that the truth might lie somewhere between these two extremes is one that must never, ever be considered for even a single second lest the entire world that has been constructed around Arsenal collapse in on itself and us all.
Maybe it’s just us, but this season more than any other recent season seems to have taken the already extreme Arsenal Experience and turned it up to 11.
There is a constant, swirling sense of CRISIS never, ever being more than a single game away for a team that is objectively good and doing objectively well. Sure, the domestic cup exits are sub-optimal and another trophyless season would be a worthy talking point. But they remain in striking distance at the top of the Premier League and as good a chance as pretty much anyone in what does look a very wide open Champions League this year.
We do have a theory for just why it’s all so febrile and rattled this year, if you’re interested. And that theory is essentially this: Liverpool.
We put it to you that were Arsenal seven points behind Manchester City again that, sure, it would still be very Arsenal and very dramatic and overblown, but it wouldn’t be as unhinged as it is now that it’s Liverpool’s coat-tails to which they desperately cling.
There’s a broiling frustration about Arsenal this season, isn’t there? A sense of opportunities missed, an indignation that Manchester City have finally revealed their all-too-human flaws and it is Liverpool rather than the Gunners set to reap the benefits.
It is far, far harder to rationalise for the Arsenal hivemind. Every comforting self-mythologising defence they had for failing to overcome the Evil City Empire fails utterly when aimed Liverpool’s way.
Liverpool are a team that has done things the right way, as Arsenal see it: being very rich and successful at the most important time in the history of English football to be already very rich and successful. Proper Club, aren’t they? Not like your Citys or Chelseas.
Coming off second best to Liverpool is to come off second best to a true, level-playing-field rival. Which means Arsenal not in fact being the greatest and pluckiest team of against-the-odds strivers in history and just another rich club coming up slightly short. That does not fit with the self-identity of the sort of fan who refers to their club entirely unironically with the definite article.
It won’t do at all. And the fact it’s not even Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool only makes it worse. Arne Slot rocking up and winning the league in year one of a project? Without even making any signings? How on earth are Arsenal supposed to rationalise that.
And things have not got even worse for the Gunners, with Wednesday night’s magnificent last ever Merseyside Derby at Goodison Park revealing that this Liverpool team Arsenal can’t catch isn’t even perfect, but is in fact a headloss wheels-off melodramatic basket case of its own.
Liverpool have stolen Arsenal’s identity and are living a better life with it. No wonder it stings.
5) Bournemouth (5)
It’s not just that Bournemouth are seventh in the league. It’s not just that they’re only a single point outside a (probable) Champions League place. It’s not just that they have the joint-best home defensive record in the country alongside Liverpool.
And it’s not even that they’re still in the FA Cup with a very winnable home tie with Wolves on the horizon. Or even just that their upcoming Premier League fixture list – one that features Southampton, Wolves, Tottenham and Ipswich before April 1 means things could get even better.
It’s that Andoni Iraola and his team are quietly going about this excellent season while in the grip of an injury crisis the relentless tears from which would flood either half of north London overnight.
The other advantage of that injury crisis is that it might just be enough to put Spurs off sending some awkward phone calls Bournemouth’s way when they finally put Ange Postecoglou out of his misery.
4) Aston Villa (6)
Somewhere at the backs of minds there must exist some kernels of concern about what January did to an already PSR-baiting wage-bill, but for now: tits to all that. Bloody exciting, isn’t it?
Nobody can accuse Villa of not trying to capitalise on what may yet be only a fleeting Champions League status as they sauntered directly into the last 16 and avoided sullying themselves with any grubby little play-off business like such Champions League small-fry as Real Madrid or Bayern Munich or Milan or Manchester City or PSG or Juventus or Dortmund or, well, you get the idea with that.
And best of all the Champions League knockouts and that bold January/February transfer push remains only one facet of what does promise to be an exciting run to the season’s finish line for Villa.
The FA Cup has opened up tantalisingly for many clubs, but Villa are firmly among them after securing a fifth-round home tie with Cardiff, and all things remain possible in the league despite a slightly scruffy campaign – and one that has undeniably been severely impacted by those largely glorious Champions League nights – leaving with work to do.
But it’s not impossible work. Villa are not remotely close to the stage where the league is but an afterthought. It’s almost certain that fifth place this season will mean Champions League qualification for next, and that remains only four points away for Villa and currently in the hands of a very flaky Manchester City indeed (see above).
The summer may yet bring awkward and challenging questions, especially if the next few months don’t go quite to plan, but for now the vibes are very good indeed.
3) Liverpool (1)
Is that the sound of wheels coming off? The sound of heads becoming detached, and heading directly to Mars?
Have we genuinely, truly arrived at a time and a place where the entire Big Six are in one form of CRISIS or another? No, don’t be silly. You’re being silly. That’s a massive overreaction.
Still, though. It all feels a little bit different now at Liverpool than it did after they spanked Spurs silly in the Carabao Cup semi-final, doesn’t it? And that was, somehow, only a week ago.
Defeat at Plymouth in the FA Cup was bad, let’s not pretend otherwise. But it was not catastrophic. As a rough guide, if it’s the middle of February and you are going “Gah, that’s our quadruple hopes ended” then the overall trajectory of a season is still pretty solid.
Arne Slot had to take a calculated risk somewhere, and Plymouth really was as good a place as any. Liverpool should still have had too much for the Championship’s bottom club, and they didn’t.
But yeah, it happens. It’s just one of the many reasons no English club has ever done a full proper quadruple.
However, when you rest all the big guns for the Merseyside Derby that’s happening a few days later, you really do need them to do better than whatever that was at Goodison Park.
Outcome bias is a dangerous beast, and it so, so nearly ended in a victory that would have been hailed as the stuff of champions, a teak-tough win in a formbook-defenestrating situation in a cup final for your opponents. It would have been hugely significant.
But it sill wouldn’t have been a very good performance, and that’s now two slightly jumpy performances in a row at a time when Liverpool can’t really afford to lose their cool.
They have in front of them a run of four Premier League games in 11 days at the end of which they will either be champions elect or right back in a proper fight with Arsenal.
The players losing their cool at Goodison was one thing, the sight of Slot so conspicuously losing control quite another. It has been such an absurdly serene season for Liverpool that you almost forgot that isn’t really how things normally are.
And the thing with serenity for a football club is that it can disappear entirely and rapidly. Liverpool are now rattled. How they respond will define the entire season for themselves and others.
Suddenly, nervousness abounds.
2) Nottingham Forest (3)
You know you’re on to a good thing of a season when your response to an alarming 5-0 defeat is to just dust yourself down and win the next game 7-0.
Forest’s season is entering the realms of the truly absurd and very much on track to be the best outlying effort since Leicester’s title win.
Their grip on a Champions League spot remains hilariously solid; they are still three points closer to Arsenal in second than they are City and Newcastle in fifth and sixth.
Look further down and the numbers grow very quickly very silly indeed. Ten points clear of Villa! Eighteen clear of Man United! Twenty clear of Spurs!
And they’re just about managing to juggle this stellar league campaign with an FA Cup run, too, joining a list which somehow, maths-defyingly appears to include every single team in here in having a decent-looking path to the quarter-finals.
Some – and it is obviously only some – Forest fans did slightly lose the run of themselves about the failure to significantly strengthen in January, but we are taking the decision to ignore anyone who is able to write angrily about Forest possibly missing out on Champions League qualification without a cartoon style 10-ton weight of self-awareness immediately landing upon their head.
1) Newcastle United (12)
Much has changed since December. Marvel at the wrongness contained within that update here:
They are currently a mid-table team struggling and striving to break out of that group, and perhaps most worryingly don’t really look any better equipped than any of about half-a-dozen other teams to do so. They really do just look like a mid-table team under – yes, we are bravely and correctly going to say it – a mid-table manager.
The summer was a bungled mess on the incomings front which has left Eddie Howe desperately short in key areas.
The major positive was retaining all their big-ticket players – Alexander Isak, Anthony Gordon, Bruno Guimaraes – but even that is proving a double-edged sword. None of that top-tier trio is performing as they did last season and the prospect of departures looms.
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,
It still wasn’t a great summer on the incomings front, but it is now fair to say that all the rest of that is complete bollocks.
They are no long mid-table after a run of seven often compellingly hefty wins in their last nine league games, while the frankly absurd wait for a major trophy has not one but two enormously plausible routes open at this time.
That Big Three are all now doing bits. Especially Bruno Guimaraes, but especially Alexander Isak. While Joelinton and Sandro Tonali have to be mentioned for the imposing midfield trio they have formed with Bruno.
We’ll know a great deal more about where precisely Newcastle’s current form can take them in about a month from now: before March 16 they have Premier League games against Manchester City, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool and West Ham as well as an FA Cup fifth-round clash with Brighton and the Carabao Cup final.
