F365 Opinion

Hull are bad, but not quite as bad as three other teams heading out of the most lucrative league in the world...

'Winners'

The Tan Man
Did anyone else's opinion of Phil Brown and his public pep talk at Manchester City come into immediate and profound review upon watching him strut onto the pitch without a hint of humility and serenade the Hull fans in the wake of his side's defeat to a youth team? That the song sung had a personal theme - "this is the best trip I've ever been on" - seemed disconcertingly apt.

"I've never done that before," he continued afterwards. "I've never conducted 25,000 people before. Well, maybe in church. And this is my church."

God help them then.


Hull City
The table does not lie. The three worst teams in the league have been relegated and Hull have escaped because they weren't quite as bad as Newcastle, Middlesbrough or West Brom. Falling five short of the 40-point mark that is generally considered to be the safety mark for Premier League survival, the reality is that Hull have been found not good enough for the environment they will continue to reside in for at least another 12 months and only escaped due to the superior inadequacies of others.

Worth shouting about? As survival is estimated to be worth £40m, who can blame the Hull patrons for their post-match sing-song however hollow it clearly sounded. But once the euphoria - or whatever the actual emotion is when a side has survived despite being defeated on home soil by a bunch of untried kids - has died down, sober reflection ought to find Hull committing to a substantial rebuilding effort. In a rare moment of sensible clarity on Sunday, Brown spoke of recruiting "four or five players in the summer". That's a minimum.

The table does not lie: In their present state, Hull are not good enough for the Premier League and it was just their lucky year that three other teams were even less so.


Sunderland
By default only, Sunderland are now the biggest team in the north-east. That they won just three games after Christmas, taking six points from their last 13 matches, was the reality lost in their jubilation at the demise of Newcastle and Middlesbrough.


Fulham
With the identity of the top six unchanged - the only difference from 2007/08 being Arsenal's demotion from third to fourth, Chelsea finishing third rather than second and Liverpool leaping from fourth to second - Fulham were the big improvers of the campaign.


Winners

Manchester United
Aggravation avoided. Sir Alex Ferguson would have coped with the flak just fine but the furore inevitably generated if Hull had avoided the drop by beating a very weakened United team would have been an irritating and uncomfortable distraction to withstand 48 hours before a Champions League final.

Ferguson's selection of a team closer to being a fourth-choice XI than reserves was thus a sizeable - if understandable - gamble. When United lost on the final day to West Ham in similar circumstances a couple of years ago, Edwin van der Sar, Michael Carrick, Paul Scholes, Patrice Evra, Ryan Giggs, Darren Fletcher, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo all played. When the United team took to the pitch on Sunday, hard-working mathematicians announced that their squad numbers added up to 261 and declared it an unofficial record.

Boys against men? Yup, except that the boys made the men look like callow youths. That this United team could still win at the home of another fully-motivated Premier League outfit is yet another ominous indication of the power wielded at Old Trafford and its inevitable longevity. It's a point missed by critics of the Big Four's dominance, but there are no clubs quite as adept at producing young talent destined for a professional career as Manchester United, Arsenal and, to a lesser extent, Liverpool.

Hull might have been exposed and humiliated by the latest batch of youngsters from the Old Trafford production line on Sunday but the point should not be missed that their final-whistle celebrations would have been tears without the last-minute goal scored by Manucho, on loan from United for the final six months of the season, at Fulham in March for the Tigers' solitary victory of 2009.


Gary Neville
It's a bountiful business being a part-time Manchester United player. Ryan Giggs was crowned Player of the Year after 15 league starts, Rafael Da Silva was nominated for the Young Player gong on the back of six Premier League games, and Gary Neville is back in the England squad after 13 mostly-undistinguished league starts in the past 26 months.


Ritchie De Laet
Before his debut for the champions at the KC Stadium on Sunday, De Laet's most recent first-team outing had been in November for Wrexham at Kidderminster in the Vauxhall Conference. The match was attended by 2,403 hardy souls who saw De Laet replaced after just 39 minutes.


Nick Barmby
The 13 starts made by Barmby this season were almost three times as many as he made in the Championship in 2007/08.


Liverpool
So much for Sir Alex's theory that United's main challenger for the title would be the winner of the Liverpool-Chelsea Champions League tie. Pool have pushed Manchester United all the way and there is no disgrace in Rafa Benitez's team falling just short.

There's an old saying that 'You can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies' and Liverpool's considerable achievement this season has been usurping Chelsea and Arsenal to establish themselves again as the principal rivals of the world's number one football team while Ferguson's simmering antipathy towards Benitez is itself the ultimate compliment that the Spaniard could receive for his efforts. The north-west is, once again, the capital of English football.


Fernando Torres
A striker without peer. For 2008/09, Torres' record reads as 14 league goals with 20 starts. For his two years at Anfield, it reads as 38 from a total of 57 appearances. And not one of those goals was scored from the penalty spot. Phenomenal.


Chelsea
Winners of 14 of their 19 away matches in 2008/09.


Nicolas Anelka
Four goals in four games, culminating in a fabulous strike at Sunderland, have earned Anelka the Golden Boot. His tally of 19 is the lowest of any winner since Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Michael Owen and Dwight Yorke shared the 1998/99 award with 18 apiece.


Arsenal
Since November, the home defeat to Chelsea was the only loss the Gunners suffered in the league. It was a flattering deception best avoided, but how differently Arsenal's season would have been reviewed had they lost on penalties to Roma in the last 16 of the Champions League.


Robin van Persie
With his brace against Stoke, Van Persie became a 20-goal-a-season striker for the first time in his career. And with his free-kick setting up the third of Arsenal's four goals, Van Persie finished the campaign at the top of the charts for goalscoring assists during the league season.


Denilson
Make of it what you will, but no other Arsenal player started as many games in the league as the Brazilian during 2008/09.


Everton
It says a commendable amount about Everton and their achievement this season in finishing fifth that the team that beat Fulham is likely to be, with the probable exception of Marouane Fellaini replacing Jack Rodwell, the same team that will face Chelsea in the FA Cup final next weekend. Fully stretched and harshly reduced by injuries, the Toffees continue to exceed the sum of their parts.


The Away Fans In A Fixture Between Everton And Fulham
So ends one of the most remarkable sequences in the league's nascent history. Everton's win at Craven Cottage was the first occasion in the 16 matches between the two clubs since Fulham's return to the top flight in 2001 that the game was not won by the home side.


Aston Villa
The only crumb of comfort from their missed opportunity of a season is that their final points tally of 62 is two better than last year and their highest since 1995-96.


Losers

The Premier League
It is a concerning and depressing reflection on the depth of quality in the Premier League when a side playing in front of their own fans and in need of at least a point to guarantee survival can then survive despite being beaten by a fourth-string side.

In its own minor way, the game at Hull was a salient pointer towards why competing against the league's elite has become so difficult for the rest of the best. Because the Big Four horde so many players and remain such an attractive destination for young-and-upcoming hopefuls, the rest of the league is deprived of players who would walk into most first teams while United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal remain enabled to keep fighting on numerous money-spinning fronts. With their continued participation in the Champions League proving so lucrative, this perpetuating stranglehold becomes tighter with every passing year and the gap between the haves and have-nots inevitably widens.

This year's particularly miserable relegation fight was the accident waiting to happen; as the Big Four progress and improve, the rest of the league will surely continue to shrink and decline.


Newcastle United
A big club with big problems just became a far smaller club with far bigger problems.

Newcastle's demise is the culmination of years of mismanagement and fully deserved. If their relegation is to serve a positive purpose then it should be as a warning that no club can be handled with such recklessness without facing the ultimate penalty. Yet this lesson hardly required another negative case study. It was just five years ago that Leeds United spiralled out towards oblivion and Newcastle, saddled with debt and players with big contracts but small sell-on fees, are in danger of following a similar path. The survival of a club tottering on the brink can only begin with the overdue acknowledgement that they are crumbling through years of neglect and unaddressed decay. If they don't, there may be no return - and in more ways than what has to do with just being promoted from the Championship.

"These guys [the board] have big decisions," remarked Alan Shearer on Sunday evening. "A million questions need to be answered. Whoever comes in there needs to be an overhaul. Players will have to go out and the sooner it can happen, the better." Well said, but it's all been said before and who can or will trust Newcastle to save Newcastle after years and years of self-destruction? There's hope that some sort of long-term good can come of their relegation but this is Newcastle and hope very rarely matches expectation let alone realisation.


The Newcastle Team
Relegated not with a bang but a pathetic whimper. With United's kids doing them a massive favour at Hull, all Newcastle needed was a point at Villa to survive. But when it really mattered, the club with a special skill at shooting themselves in the foot couldn't even produce a shot on target in the second half.

"I've said to them in the dressing room that you can make all the excuses you want...but it's what is in the dressing room that has got us relegated," Shearer observed afterwards and it would have been the final insult if anyone argued back or put up a fight in response. Why change the habit of the previous gutless 90 minutes?

One win in his eight matches at the helm hardly absolves Shearer of blame either, especially as the only valid reason for his appointment on April Fool's Day was the idea that he would galvanise the dressing room, but the ovation he received at the final whistle was acknowledgment that his ship was sinking long before he tried to steer it clear of danger. After all the fuss over the composition of the Manchester United eleven to play at Hull, the numbers that ultimately determined the relegation fight was Newcastle's record of four managers in a single season that produced just five home wins and 34 points.


Jamie Carragher
It was Carragher who fought with Liverpool right-back Alvaro Arbeloa last weekend and explained afterward that he erupted on account of wanting to keep a clean sheet so that Pepe Reina could equal Edwin van der Sar for the Golden Gloves award. And it was Carragher, from the right-back position, who played Robbie Keane onside when the Liverpool reject scored the Tottenham goal that denied the Spaniard the clean sheet he needed to draw level.


James Beattie
Once again, an English footballer scores an own goal because, despite his status as a professional footballer, he didn't feel capable or willing to use his weaker foot even for the task of hoofing.

Pete Gill

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