Football: 10 things to look out for this weekend
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Version 0 of 1. 1) Leicester’s collection of three simple points could be complicated One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy … and so on, all the way up to seeing 11 Magpies, which is a harbinger of three easy points. So there could hardly be any more inviting assignment for Leicester players this weekend as they seek to put all that ostrich business behind them and get back to trying to run away from the relegation zone like big goofy flightless birds (what do you mean: “What ostrich business?” Have you all been away? Have you had your heads buried in the sand? Are you flexible enough to bury your heads in the sand?). Having said that, Leicester’s task could be complicated by a couple of things. Firstly, if Robert Huth has not recovered from the injury that forced him off against Chelsea, then that risks seriously weakening Leicester’s defence and perhaps even persuading Nigel Pearson to abandon the back three he has tended to use during his team’s resurgence. Secondly, Newcastle may be about to embark on a resurgence of their own, as John Carver responded to flak from Newcastle fans by inviting two of them to come meet him at the training ground on Thursday. Ostensibly the idea was to allow the fans to see behind the scenes to prove that the manager and players are genuinely doing their utmost to halt their miserable losing streak. But maybe Carver hopes, rather naively you suspect, that a pep talk from passionate fans will give Newcastle players an extra psychological boost. Certainly the manager needs to do something drastic if Newcastle are to avoid racking up an eighth consecutive loss, their worst run since they lost 10 in a row in 1977, when Newcastle finished the season second-bottom. Since we’re on the subject of omens, perhaps we should mention that the team that finished below that historically awful Newcastle side were, yes, Leicester. PD • Nigel Pearson apologises for calling journalist an ‘ostrich’• Two Newcastles: the clubs on different sides of the globe united by strife 2) A strong finish could help Pellegrini, if not Manchester City Suddenly things don’t look quite as calamitous for Manchester City. They’re not going to win the league, but as things stand they are second and Liverpool’s increasing slump means the vague talk of them dropping out of the top four seems to have disappeared. Still, they are level on points with Arsenal, who have a game in hand, only two points ahead of Manchester United, and face by far the toughest test of the challengers this weekend against Tottenham at White Hart Lane. City will be in the Champions League next season, so aside from the admittedly inconvenient summer qualifiers they could avoid by finishing second or third, does it really matter where they end up in the top four? It might do to Manuel Pellegrini, the manager whose failures in most competitions this season have made his position look iffy, to say the least, despite the indications from the club that he will not be sacked in the summer. There is a sense though, that Pellegrini underestimates the decline in performances from City this season, saying this month: “If we finish in seventh place without [qualifying for] Europe, I understand [the criticism]. I appreciate that you think the only team that must win the title is City.” But it is not just that they are not going to win anything, but more the manner of their title defence has not been much better than limp and reasonably embarrassing. Since Roberto Mancini was dismissed in 2013 for a similar campaign (although there were other issues contributing to that decision) it would seem odd if the club were not at least considering his position. Would a strong finish to the season help Pellegrini’s cause? Well, it couldn’t hurt. NM • Manchester City’s quiet man Manuel Pellegrini elects to battle for job• Will anyone break the Premier League’s top-four monopoly any time soon? 3) The final day of the Championship could be appropriately chaotic At one point the final day of the Championship season was set to be one of those afternoons when you would need a bank of screens to rival William Baldwin in the film Sliver if you wanted to keep up with everything. But not now. Wins in midweek for Bournemouth and Rotherham all-but secured promotion for the former and survival, at the expense of Wigan and Millwall, for the latter. The Millers manager Steve Evans took particular pleasure in their victory over Reading, honkingly bragging that he had “12 bottles of pink champagne” to celebrate with and encouraging Millwall forward Lee Gregory, who hoped Rotherham would “bottle it”, to “look forward to League One, son, and keep your trap shut”. Now, only the play-off spots are up for grabs, but that still promises to be something of a scramble, with four teams – Ipswich, Derby, Brentford and Wolves – vying for two places. The latter three face teams towards the bottom of the table at home (Reading, Wigan and Millwall respectively), while Ipswich travel to Blackburn. But the Championship is such a frantic division at the best of times, never mind when something like this is at stake, so predicting anything would be a fool’s game. Ipswich require just a point to seal their place in the end-of-season bottom-twitchers, while even if they lose they could still get away with it. Wolves are praying for goals and that the other three all slip up if they are to have a chance, but perhaps the most interesting team of the quartet is sixth-placed Derby. Due to their vastly superior goal difference they only require a point, and while they have ostensibly corrected or stabilised their terrible form of March that saw them slip out of contention for an automatic spot (they’re unbeaten in six), there is still enough potential for calamity to see them drop away. In their last two games they have scored seven goals but have still only picked up two points, and the side are so prone to defensive snafus that their fans should not exactly start booking hotels in the Wembley area just yet. Still, at least their opponents Reading will stride out onto the pitch with a rousing call to arms from Steve Clarke still ringing in their ears. “We lack leaders on the pitch,” Clarke said this week. “You can see that. You can see when something goes wrong, immediately the first response is to stand away and find a place to hide on the pitch. This is not a way forward for any team.” Leaders or not, Saturday lunchtime promises to be chaotic and nerve-shredding. The Championship wouldn’t have it any other way. NM • The Championship table as it stands before the final day• Evans tells Millwall striker Lee Gregory: ‘keep your trap shut 4) Some spice on the final day for League One The top of League One still has a pinch of spice to it, with MK Dons and Preston duking it out to join Bristol City in the automatic promotion spots, but the truly hot tamale is at the foot of the table. Yeovil are toast and have been for some time, but above them six teams are still in danger of filling the other three spots of doom. Leyton Orient and Colchester, currently second and third-bottom, look in the most danger, with the former two points from safety and requiring a collection of collapses above them, while the latter face the aforementioned Preston. Crawley Town could save their own skins and drag Coventry into the drink by beating them at home, but the Sky Blues’ demotion would require both Crewe and Notts County to beat Bradford and Gillingham. Notts County are perhaps the most intriguing, having sacked Shaun Derry in March, put Paul Hart in temporary charge for a couple of games while Ricardo Moniz initially turned them down, then changed his mind and took the job with six games of the season left. Moniz has only won one game in his spell in charge, last week against Doncaster, but that was enough to take them out of the bottom four and put survival in their own hands. Equally, Orient are surely the most depressing, losing in the play-offs last season before the owner Francesco Becchetti appointed the hapless Fabio Liverani as manager, a decision that has seen them rise no higher than 19th place since October. It might be a stretch to call it a fall from grace, but it will certainly be a fall. NM • The League One table as it stands before the final day• Paul Sturrock looks to paint a brighter future for Yeovil after wilderness years 5) Will Lambert and Lallana get another chance together? In the 65th minute of Liverpool’s lame defeat at Hull on Tuesday night, Brendan Rodgers had a brainwave: he introduced Adam Lallana and Rickie Lambert from the bench. That meant 25 whole minutes together on the pitch for players who spent years colluding to undo defences while at Southampton. Bearing in mind that Rodgers tries to cultivate a style of play that relies heavily on players being in sync with each other, you would have thought that Lambert and Lallana’s understanding was something to build on, but the manager has been oddly reluctant to deploy them this season, just as he seldom used to put Stewart Downing and Andy Carroll on the pitch at the same time even though those players seemed naturally complementary. Rodgers has only started Lambert and Lallana together four times in the league, and in none of those matches did they both play the full 90 minutes. They began at Crystal Palace in November and Lambert scored after two minutes from a pass by Lallana, then Lallana missed the next two games before the pair started again at Leicester, where Lambert took out the nearest defender as Lallana scored Liverpool’s opener. They both started the next match, at home to Sunderland, but as neither had scored after 70 minutes, Rodgers withdrew Lallana and never started the duo together again. Perhaps the decision to deploy them at the same time against Hull means Rodgers is going to give their partnership a belated chance to flourish anew? The dire form of Mario Balotelli and, recently, of Raheem Sterling would make refusing to do so even more baffling than before. Meanwhile, Queens Park Rangers’ hopes of staging a late escape from the relegation zone will depend heavily on Charlie Austin, who, if Rangers do go down, would be a reasonable summer recruit by Liverpool, assuming Rodgers would then actually use him properly. PD • Liverpool fan group warns boycott repeat after protest at £50 Hull tickets• Brendan Rodgers defiant after Liverpool lose 1-0 to Hull City• Ramsey: QPR need two wins and maybe a draw to stay in Premier League 6) Can Defoe pull something out of the bag for Sunderland? When people talk about a game in hand, it often carries with it the implication that ‘game in hand’ equals ‘three points in the bag’, which is clearly nonsense at the best of times nevermind when the team in question is Sunderland. Leicester’s implausible run of form has seen Dick Advocaat’s men slip into the bottom three, a point behind the Foxes but with that spare match to take into account. Alas, that match is against Arsenal, so perhaps Advocaat should not pin much hope on getting anything at the Emirates, and instead focus on getting something in their more winnable games, starting against Southampton on Saturday. The good news for Sunderland is that Morgan Schneiderlin will be absent (out for the rest of the season, possibly the rest of his Southampton career, with a knee problem), and without the Frenchman the Saints are a different proposition. But the bad news for Sunderland is that they might not have the firepower to take advantage of Schneiderlin’s injury. The Black Cats have not scored more than once in a league game since January, and the man they recruited that month to provide the goals that would take them to safety, Jermain Defoe, only has three in 12 league games. Defoe can, to say the least, look rather anonymous when he isn’t finding the net but he’s been worth keeping for his potential ability to pull something out of the bag – as he did against Newcastle. But he has not done that enough; Sunderland have the joint-worst scoring record in the division, and if they go down that will be the primary cause of their demise. NM • Connor Wickham believes great escape is achievable again• Schneiderlin to miss rest of season with knee injury• Senegal’s ‘little diamond’ Sadio Mané motivated by high expectations 7) Will Van Gaal stick with what worked or change what failed? “This is a massive wake-up call for us,” said Chris Smalling after Manchester United’s defeat to Everton last weekend, which rather curiously Louis van Gaal said he saw coming from the warm-up. “You hope you can recover and stimulate your players by saying something before the game but by then it is too late,” the manager said. “You have to prepare the match two or three days before. Everton did that and they have won because of that.” So what are we to make of Manchester United in these last few weeks? Are they the side that artfully outclassed Tottenham, Liverpool and Manchester City? Or the one that were stifled by an excellent Chelsea or who were too sluggish to get past Everton? Broadly the same team and tactics were used in all of the games mentioned, so what will be interesting is whether Van Gaal will take the Everton game as an aberration or as a signal to change approach. With Robin van Persie now available after injury, he at least has options. The match could also indicate whether he has written off Ángel di María – if he is going to use the Argentinian after a couple of chastening defeats a game against West Brom, who have little to play for, would seem like the perfect time to reintroduce him. NM • Adnan Januzaj’s future at Manchester United in the balance• Premier League finances: the full club-by-club breakdown and verdict 8) Questions abound for Sherwood’s Aston Villa Related: Tom Fox: ‘rich person interested in buying Aston Villa … why is that news?’ The sudden surges by Hull and Leicester mean that Aston Villa, despite their own upswing in form, continue to wobble on the precipice. Yet their performances against Tottenham, Liverpool and Manchester City suggest that this weekend’s match against a resurgent Everton will be an entertaining meeting of near-equals that poses plenty of intriguing questions, such as: will Jack Grealish be able to wriggle free of James McCarthy and Gareth Barry? Will Ross Barkley be able to elude Carlos Sánchez? Will John Stones and Phil Jagielka be able to contain Christian Benteke better than the Villa defence deal with Romelu Lukaku? And will Tim Sherwood’s team continue to play as if unencumbered by the tension of the fight for survival? PD • Martínez: Everton’s Bryan Oviedo to miss rest of season• Benteke’s agent says there has been no interest in Aston Villa striker 9) Could Pardew and Crystal Palace delay Chelsea’s coronation? So Chelsea are to be champions, with three points required against Crystal Palace on Sunday to wrap up things in quick time. That, of course, is not quite the gimme that it might seem to be, given Palace’s predilection for the pulling down of big club pants this season. A few weeks ago Alan Pardew declared that he could do a better job than most of the managers in the Premier League’s top four, and promptly backed up his words by sweeping a desperate Manchester City aside at Selhurst Park. He has a chance to pull off a similar feat at Stamford Bridge, and in the world of Pardew he will regard it as perfectly possible. But he will have to reverse the tide of the last couple of games, a brace of 2-0 home defeats to West Brom and Hull. In fact, if Palace do not don their big game trousers in the coming weeks, their final league position might not turn out to be what Pardew had his eye on, with Manchester United and Liverpool following the Chelsea encounter. In what has been a largely predictable season, Pardew has provided something of a wild card, and it would be entertaining, if nothing else, if he pulled off another surprise on Sunday. NM • Jonathan Wilson: José Mourinho and the issue of ‘boring’ and ‘immoral’ football• Cech: Winning the title will make Chelsea’s next generation stronger 10) Is this Burnley’s last chance? Perhaps the surprise about Burnley is not so much that they are on the verge of dropping into the Championship, but more that they are still alive at all. This was a squad crammed with players who screamed of second tier quality at the start of the season, but many have raised their game to make a decent fist of survival. Without wishing to sound patronising (although it inevitably does), Sean Dyche and his team are to be credited for their performances. That said, this weekend might well be their last realistic chance of survival, given that they are facing West Ham, whose season is drifting into the ether like a wisp of smoke from a campfire, though some of those above them have equally winnable games. “The frustrating thing is that performances, on the whole, have been good,” said Dyche this week about a run of form which has seen Burnley win just once (against Manchester City, oddly) since January. “We’ve had our ups and downs, but that can happen in the Premier League … We have to be more clinical. We started well against Leicester – they were as powerful as they have been all season. But stats don’t win games, goals do.” Dyche’s upbeat nature is one of the reasons he has been so endearing this season, but should results go against them, by the end of the weekend Burnley could find themselves eight points from safety with only three games remaining. Survival is looking like a tough task. NM • Burnley to ban 21 fans for life after violence in town• The Premier League table as it stands |