Europe has been in shutdown this last week and a half because of a volcano in meltdown in Iceland, and football has not escaped its heavenly wrath. Meanwhile, League One continues to be an enigma right to the end – although at least Norwich have deservedly been promoted. And, the Premier League’s top four have had a poor season this year – but it may not be the same next season. Sean Smith writes…
Chelsea are just a few games from an historic double for the club, but the concensus of opinion is that they are a poor winner of a broken league weakened by the financial crisis of the last few years. What does this mean for the near future of English football. Is it heading backwards?
Labour’s new plan for fan ownership of football clubs, while in priniciple a good eye, smacks of political interference on a subject that football is more than capable of sorting out for itself. Uefa already has plans in place to tackle the difficult subject of club ownership and overspending. Politicians should learn from the mistakes they have made in the past, meddling in the game that we have invested so much in.
We used to have the big four, which now seems to have morphed into the big eight (or is it just three now). Anyway, the gaps started to form with the inception of the Premier League in 1992. Since then, the aftershocks have affected football in England to the nth degree. But where is the gap now, and what does this disjointed atmosphere mean for the future of the game. Sean Smith reports…
After the scourge of a brutal winter comes the gamblers scourge of unpredictable pitches. It looked like the usual rant of a madman when Sir Alex Ferguson suggested that the turgid pitch had “killed Wayne Rooney”, but he may have a point. The problems with the Wembley pitch are well documented, but elsewhere in England – as the permafrost threatened to lift across the country – an unprecedented number of managers claimed the pitch as a factor in iffy results. There were grumblings at Peterborough in The Championship as the poor surface did nothing to help a home side that prefers to play it on the deck, but the worst pitching – inevitably – further down the leagues.
So we have three teams within three points of each other at the top of the Premier League, and the bookies are undecided as to who is going in it. Chelsea (61 points) and Man Utd (60 points) are impossible to split at 6/4, while Arsenal (58 points) are a little bit bigger on 11/4. Exciting stuff, eh? And, here’s the thing: it’s going to get a lot more exciting because the outsider is going to rip right through the field and win.
The Premier League aside – and we still have midweek games to go this week in the English Premier League – we had a very profitable weekend with some very generous odds. I hope you all got a decent price on Leicester City beating Sheffield Wednesday at home. We advised 4/5, but I know that the slightly more generous 10/11 was still available on Betfair only two hours before kick-off. Leicester’s 3-0 victory highlighted what is now happening in the Championship: the form lines are starting to work themselves out, which is good for those able to pick through the clues to find winners.
