Yahoo! Cisse celebrates bashing in another outstanding goal.

Newcastle Utd: Best In Show

Can it be that Newcastle actually started the season with Joey Barton in their ranks? It’s a measure of the stunning transformation in the side that it seems almost inconceivable that any of their previous olde engerlish spine of Nolan, Carroll and Barton were anything other than a distant memory for the club.

Their dramatic rise from mid-table mediocrity to the foothills of Europe is down to the most effective set of transfers since Wenger first brought in Viera, Petit and Anelka. Demba Ba, Cabaye and, above all, the inspired Cissé have blended spectacularly with Krul, Coloccini and the excellent if erratic Hatem Ben Arfa to produce the surprise team of the season.

If it was a bit of a shock to see Newcastle regularly holding down a top four position during the first half of the season, it was rewarding to see them there or thereabouts during the run in. Ultimately they were only undone thanks to losses to some of the big boys like Arsenal, Man City and, er, Wigan (although they weren’t the only ones to get a grand duffing by the upstarts).

It’s a tribute to manager Alan Pardew that Newcastle have become everyone’s second favourite team (narrowly pipping Swansea), playing great football and scoring tons of fabulous goals (3 out of the top ten goals of the season ain’t bad). And it’s a veiled compliment that all the big teams are looking at their star players. Let’s hope the team stays together for at least another year as I look forward to their participation in the Europa League – they’ll surely take it more seriously than Spurs or Liverpool and have a far more realistic chance of success. A season there and they’ll be ready for the Champions League.

Chelsea: That’s Not Rebuilding, That’s Killing Your Children

The first real disappointments of the season, Chelsea’s problems are a snapshot of the difficulties of the Prem. A successful side looking over the edge of the hill, they were desperate for rejuvenation, a dose of fresh blood to provide respite to the aging legs of the Drog, Terry, Lampard, Cole, Cech and co, while bringing on the second squad of Ramieres, Miereles, Malouda and, above all, Torres. Bouyed by an new manager, the Europa League winning André Villas Boas, what could possibly go wrong?

Strangely enough it seems that the aging big boys didn’t take kindly to being told that they were no longer the be all and end all of the club’s planning. Equally, new tactics failed to spark the new boys into action. You sense if Villas Boas had been able to get something (anything) out of Torres things might have turned out differently. Instead Chelsea flopped down the table (not as drastically as Arsenal, but pretty badly nonetheless) and serious action was required.

Amazingly Di Matteo has pulled the team around and despite only finishing sixth, their worst season for a long time, they have achieved Abramovitch’s dream of the Champions League final and have a genuine chance of winning the one prize he really values.

Everton: Overachievement As Standard

God knows what Everton manager David Moyes does during the summer. But whatever it is he really needs to change it. Everton’s season was, well, classic Everton. Start poorly, come good over the Spring and the run in and finish in the Top Ten. You sense that if only he could get Everton to kick off their season in, say, October rather than February, then Everton would be genuine contenders.

Instead, yet again, Everton are left to ruminate on what might have been. If only Pienaar hadn’t got googly eyes for the big time at Spurs, where his benchwarming stats were impressive, if only Cahill hadn’t been injured, if only they’d bought Jelavic in the Autumn rather than the Spring. If only they’d beaten Liverpool in that FA Cup semi-final.

Still finishing above Liverpool makes this a season to savour for the blues.

Liverpool: That’s Not A Season, That’s A Catastrope

£100 million+ spent on new players, a venerated manager with Premier League winning experience, the most expensive English striker, what could possibly go wrong? Try September 18. when possibly the worst Liverpool team in living memory was comprehensively shafted by Spurs at White Hart Lane. Liverpool were so bad that they were four down by the 67th minute and had lost two men by full time. After this, the team was simply a carcrash waiting to happen.

Add to this the kind of PR fuck up that only Gerald Ratner could dream about, as Liverpool managed to turn the Suarez/Evra racist incident from a mishap into a total disaster. Rather than coming out and saying something like , “hey, he/we made a mistake, we’re really sorry, Liverpool has always been about fair play and values, we’ve seen great players come to Anfield and their talent has never been related to their skin colour”, a move which might have turned a calamity into an advantage, they reinforced the sense of blind, pig-headed entitlement that suffuses the city.

They even managed to make winning the Carling Cup, where they scraped by a poor Championship side, look like more of a disaster than Arsenal’s loss the previous season.

With an seemingly endless set of failures, Carroll, Adam, The Invisible Henderson and, above all, Downing, Dalglish managed to turn even Liverpool supporters against him (albeit very politely). Whether he gets the chance to continue the job next season is highly debatable.

Sergio Aguero goes mental having just won the prem with the last kick of the season

Man City: That’s The Way To Do It

WOW! Top of the Prem for most of the year, biggest pockets by around a billion or so, best team and they snatch glory from the brink of catastrophe with the final kick of the season. That’s the Man City way of winning the league. No doubt they have been the best side this season, with games against Spurs away and Man U being the highlights, but I suspect that consolidating second rather than winning the Prem was their goal at the start of the season. It was only when they roared away with the league over the Autumn that winning it became a realistic achievement. And even then it was a darn close thing.

Their off-pitch shinanighans and mid-season slump showed that this City side are still vulnerable. A number of players, Silva and Dzeko in particular, looked burnt out by the end of the season, and it took a while for Yaya Touré to get over the Africa Cup of Nations. Still even wantaway munchkin Tevez and notorious bad boy Ballotelli came good in the end.

With a first title in the bag City are bound to be having a big summer, what with finally shipping out five years worth of not-quite-up-to-it talent at rock bottom prices and needing to improve their squad if they want to realistically challenge in Europe as well as dominate the Prem.

Man U: Title No 20 Will Be Hard Work

How the season ended. As they say, the table never lies

It’s hard to tell what will hurt United the most, knowing that they pushed City so close that they ended up with enough points to win the Prem in practically ever other year, or knowing that they lost it on goal difference. United’s faces when they heard that Aguero had scored had the kind of shell-shocked look about them that only an entire year in the trenches can bring.

If last year’s surprise Champions were United’s worst team in living memory, then this year’s team were potentially even worse. They lost Vidic and Ferdinand for much of the season, had a new keeper who took time to find his feet, and hadn’t really done anything to beef up their midfield. Players who came in, Cleverly, Jones, Smalling still looked like ones for the future, while Ashley Young merely lived up to his Villa hype, the occasional great goal and a lot of diving. It’s a sign of concern that it took the return of the previously retired Paul Scholes to really kick start their season.

That said, their form in the second half of the season was outstanding and had they held City at home to, say, just the two goals, they could have been Champions themselves.

Arsenal: How Did That Happen?

To lose one key midfielder during the close season is bad, to lose three smacks of incompetence. In selling Fabregas and Nasri (albeit unwillingly) and losing Wilshire to injury for a year, Arsenal managed to gut themselves completely. Certainly their replacements, Ramsey, Arteta and Rosicky never quite fulfilled the potential, as their nose dive into the bowels of relegation during the Autumn clearly showed. So it’s pretty damn impressive that they managed to not only regain their place in the top four but actually improved on their final position last year.

Still Arsenal’s failings are well known and were very visible this season. A suicidal defence, especially when it’s not heavily protected from midfield, a thoroughly lousy set of second teamers  capable of losing to pretty much anyone, any time, anywhere (Chamakh, Bendtner, Vela, Djourou, Squillaci, Park, and Arshavin are just the pick of the bunch), a pretty disastrous history of transfer dealings (see useless second teamers list) and the internal fortitude of a roasted marshmallow. Nothing that happened this season, aside from the replacement of the retiring Pat Rice, looks like changing any of that. They can’t afford another close season of selling their best players.

Four moments stand out in their season. The first was Szczesny’s penalty save against Udinese in the Champions League qualifying round. I think if Arsenal had lost that game their season really would have imploded. The second was Sagna’s goal against Spurs. 2 down, having played well, it was a trasformational statement moment, a stern bullet into the net followed not by a celebration, but by a determined retrieval of the ball and a race back to kick off. A rare moment when the entire team effectively said, ‘Fuck this, we mean business’.  The third was the removal of Arshavin. His return to Russia seemed to galvanise the team to their most consistent run of results. Finally, the short term import of Thierry Henry after Christmas gave the fans something to shout about and sparked something in the team itself.  None of which should camouflage the fragility of Arsenal’s position. This has been a dreadful season that Wenger and the team have somehow managed to salvage. This summer is possibly the most important of Arsène’s reign.

Spurs: Mind The Gap

Not that there really is that much of a gap, a single point and equal goal difference was the difference between Spurs and Arsenal. Yet not so long ago, before that Sagna goal in fact, Spurs were 13 points ahead and potential Championship contenders. Now they face a painful wait to discover whether 4th will actually be good enough to get to the Champions League qualifiers. Their collapse has been one of the most impressive slides this season.

Rumour has it that it was all ‘Arry’s fault, as his eyes bulged a little too far into his head when his Engerland coronation was announced by his media chums, but the fact is that his team simply ran out of steam. Like City they played beautiful football for the first half of the season (their total demolition of Liverpool at home being a particular favourite), but like them they hit the wall some time in early Spring. And, unlike City, they didn’t have the players to step up and fill the gaps left by an exhausted Bale, Modric, Van der Vaart or Adebayor – something that was quite clear when their second teamers failed to make it out of the Europa League group stage.

With a bunch of older players or loanees beefing up the side, you have to feel that this team is on the cusp and may already have peaked. It will need substantial readjustment over the summer, especially if Man City decide they want Adebayor back or sell/loan him to someone else or fancy a bit of Modric to go with Silva and Nasri. So let’s hope Bayern win the Big Cup and Spurs get their golden ticket for next season.

If footballers liked handbags, chances are they'd be handbags like this, only with go faster stripes and Nike logos all over

As we drift inexorably into ‘Real Squeaky Bum Time’, the psychological effects of a year in the Prem are beginning to manifest themselves. Now there are those of us who might say that in a season where we’ve seen Tevez huffing off after he decided he couldn’t be arsed to huff on, where Suarez refuses to confront the fact that he appears to be both a cheat and a racist, where ‘Appy ‘Arry can admit to his dog trousering a 10% fee for its role in the Peter Crouch transfer (or something like that), that the psychological effects might already have burst to the surface like a series of unsightly boils. But no, apparently that was only the start of it.

The Easter Fortnight (for that is what it is as any fule kno) has seen more Prem football being flung at us poor punters than it is humanly possible to actually absorb. Apparently we have jumped from Week 30 to Week 33 in the space of about 5 days. Flagship BBC football show Match Of The Day has had to go into total 24-hour nuclear lockdown, sacrificing not only presenter Colin Murray’s self-esteem, but doing away with those many ‘oh-so-amusing-not’ YouTube montages they seem to spend all their time putting together now that they can’t quite afford to buy any football highlights to show us. Shows on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Wednesday have reduced all but the most stalwart of MOTD diehards to gibbering slime. Even former top pundit Hansen was sent out for a breather but he made the mistake of going to see one of Liverpool’s matches, which just indicates how mentally scarring the whole experience has been for all concerned.

So On To The Handbags

So, what with minor details like Who Will Win The Prem, Who Will Get The Big Cup Places, Who Is For The Drop and, most vitally, Who Is For Coming Above Liverpool In The Table still to be resolved, it’s no wonder that some in the Prem have begun to feel the heat. And while we haven’t seen anything quite as funny as the Dyer vs Bowyer bustup of the olden days, we saw a bevvy of on-pitch same team beatings (or team bondings as Craig Bellamy apparently calls them). How we laughed when plucky Wolves keeper Wayne Hennessey laid into experienced salt and alleged drunkard Roger ‘two relegations’ Johnson for the latter’s defensive fuckuperies.

How we doubled over when superMario went mental and started having it out with his teammates over who was going to take a free kick, as if that was going to make any difference to the finest slide down the table since Newcastle manager Kevin Keegan went ballistic on TV and gift wrapped the Prem for Man U all those years ago.

So What Has Been Happening On The Pitch Then?

Man U have turned their monster wheeled juggernaut up to 11 and have effectively simply bulldozered themselves into first place. Admittedly this is as much thanks to some very dubious refereeing over a number of matches as it is to their actual sporting prowess. It appears that where Man U are concerned refs and their support teams are happy to remain ignorant of the Laws of the game regarding both what is a penalty and what constitutes offside. Over the course of matches against Fulham and QPR, Man U have effectively been gifted six points (and the Premiership), while QPR could be taking the plunge into the Championship. So the next time Ferguson bitches about refs, someone should put him straight.

Meanwhile, former big cheeses Chelsea haven’t found themselves immune to the bonuses of refereeing stupidity. Their match against Wigan saw them gifted not one, but two clearly offside goals. Admittedly Wigan were able to score a totally legitimate goal, but apparently they still only count the same as offside ones the ref has given. So it was all the points Chelsea and a sack full of nothing (and hello relegation) for Wigan.

Not getting the benefits of anything are plucky spring chickens Tottenham Not-Quite-So-Hotspur. Their slide down the table has been matched only by Wolves and Blackburn, although admittedly neither of those has quite as far to fall, even if their landings will be oh so much more painful. Spurs are currently suffering what is known as ‘relegation form’ as they struggle to actually accumulate any points at all. It’s impressive to think that while Man City may have thrown away the title, Spurs have managed to turn a potential 13 point lead and third place into a possible 5 point gap and participation in the Race For Fourth/Sixth in just over a month. Still they’re in the FA Cup semis which will surely keep their fans happy. Until they are eliminated by Chelsea thanks to a no-doubt offside assisted goal.

Aside from one crap performance at QPR, Arsenal appear to have salvaged their season. Not content with rising to third, which given their appalling start to the season is nothing short of miraculous, they effectively ensured Man City would sacrifice the title by giving them as good a 1-0 kicking as it’s possible to do. Not only did they beat City, but superMario was sent off, lickspittle turncoat Nasri had the kind of game he’ll have to go into therapy to forget and Arsenal fans celebrated by doing the Posnan goal celebration as City players fought each other down the tunnel at the end. Ahhh, happy days eh?

Trundling around the mid-table marshes hasn’t been fun though. Stoke appear to be punching above their weight in 12th, given their goal difference suggests they should be around the 15th place spot, while the likes of West Brom, Swansea, and Sunderland look like they have certainly done enough to avoid relegation, but probably not quite enough to embarrass Liverpool. That feat is being left to Everton (currently embarrassing Liverpool), Fulham and, astonishingly, Naarich, who are merely three points behind the reds. A few more ‘Liverpudlian’ results and King Kitman’s Kombine could be involved in the very exciting Race For Tenth.

Down in Deathsville (population 6), it’s a grim life scraping in the dirt for points. Especially when you don’t just believe everyone is against you, but everyone actually is against you, including the refs. Wolves are discarding points like they were competition losing crisp wrappers, Wigan can’t score enough to compete with the poor decisions that are going against them, Blackburn can’t defend, QPR can’t keep 11 players on the field, Bolton continue to believe that David Ngog is a goalscorer and Aston Villa can’t seem to accumulate the 3 points they need to create real distance between themselves and the other poor suckers at the bottom.  The dream of relegation for McLeish, Hughes and Wolves is still very much on.