Premier League champions-elect Liverpool only marginally happier than Everton

It’s another international break, and you know what that means. That’s right, it can only mean time for another look at where we went wrong last time when ranking the moods around the Premier League.

We were right about Spurs, though. And Man City. They’re both still miserable.

The otherwise woefully out-of-date February instalment is here if you want a chuckle, with the relevant placings in brackets throughout the below.

 

20) Tottenham (20)
Just wait, Ange Postecoglou’s few remaining supporters would insist, until all the injured players are back. Then you’ll see. They are and we have. Spurs are still sh*t. His football is still often sh*t and nearly always very stupid.

And after every one of Spurs’ defeats Big Ange now gets into a fight with either fans or post-match interviewers or both if they dare to put forward the idea that defeats are bad mmmkay.

There remains, somehow, the small but decidedly non-zero chance that Postecoglou pulls an absolute Homer and wins the Europa League. It’s impossible to overstate just how much that transforms everything about this season.

It might not be the most important thing about it, but we do think there are only two places Spurs can end the season in these rankings, and those two places are first and last.

This is a season that for Spurs really does appear to have crystallised and distilled down to two possible outcomes. First, and most likely, their worst season since before the Premier League And The Invention Of Football. When you consider just how utterly crap Spurs were for much of the nineties and early noughties, that’s a staggering achievement.

But not as staggering as the only alternative which is an end to their own trophy drought and with it qualification for the Champions League, which would genuinely make this Spurs’ best season for at least 40 years.

Every ounce of this is just so wildly on-brand it’s almost hack. And that in itself does rather steer us towards one of the two possibilities over the other, doesn’t it?

Spurs’ existential despair over that albatross of a trophy drought has already been exacerbated by Newcastle exorcising their own demons, and with every chance of Villa, Bournemouth, Forest, Brighton or somesuch also joining the ever-growing list of clubs to win a trophy more recently than Tottenham there is a profound sense that while it’s always true that whatever happens in football the joke is always on Spurs it may never have been more true, the joke never more entirely on them, than it has been this season.

Unless, of course, they can somehow defy history, logic and reason to land an unlikely punchline of their own. Mate.

READ: Ten reasons why this has been the worst Premier League season ever

 

19) Southampton (14)
We remain committed advocates for the idea that if you’re going to end up getting relegated it is much, much better to get it all sorted out and squared away nice and early. Give yourselves plenty of time to come to terms with the inevitable, crushing reality of your situation and not have your emotions endlessly played with by the cruel bastard torture of hope.

But f*cking hell, lads, there are limits. We didn’t mean just lose every game. We didn’t mean be worse than f*cking Derby. Jeez.

Southampton have certainly ensured theirs has been a season unencumbered by hope, but they’ve done that so effectively that it’s brought on its own stresses from now having to try not to be worse than absolutely anyone else who has ever been in the Premier League.

That’s not good. You have to go all the way back to before Christmas to find the last time Southampton managed even a point against someone other than a team that’s also going down miserably this season.

Four of the nine points they have managed to cobble together this season have come against Ipswich, and it’s a formline that does rather place a significant onus on May’s trip to Leicester as the only plausible source of the three points the Saints still need to overhaul that infamous Derby effort.

Although for obvious reasons we do still hold out some hope for the trip to Tottenham in a few weeks’ time. That’s not even just drearily predictable ‘LOL Spurs’ bantz, either. Ipswich and Leicester have both already won there, after all.

 

18) Leicester (19)
Rightly or wrongly, the team we blame most for this season’s utter and unacceptable absence of anything even approaching a proper relegation fight. There was always a good chance they’d go down, obviously, but we didn’t think they’d do so with this pathetic a whimper.

Replacing a solid, canny coach who was at least keeping Leicester in games with a shiny exciting rookie who has not done that is immensely irritating. Their aggregate Premier League score since a very, very funny 2-1 win at Spurs towards the end of January is now 0-16 from six pitiful defeats, and the two quickfire goals with which they bantered off permanent joke-butts Spurs are their only Premier League goals since the first weekend of January.

Just an abject capitulation of a season from a club with very recent, very decent Barclays heritage.

 

17) Manchester City (18)
Sometimes teams are good enough to make this easy for us and we can just repeat what we wrote a month or two months or four months ago without having been exposed as Wrongy McWrongface. Bless those clubs.

Here’s February’s Man City update:

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.

Yeah, it’s still that, isn’t it? We still fall for it after every half-decent win, but the part of us that thinks “Here they go…” grows smaller with every follow-up defeat.

City’s last three Premier League wins have now been followed by defeats. It’s the exact opposite of what they have reliably delivered – especially in the second half of seasons – for years and years and years.

Might well win the FA Cup. Might well be absolutely fine again next season. But right now? Sh*t. Confusingly, very possibly era-endingly sh*t.

And we miss them in the title race.

 

16) Ipswich (15)
Spent a large chunk of this season not really getting the results their efforts and performances deserved. Have recently remedied that, though, and are now getting precisely the results their efforts and performances have deserved.

Sadly, there are two ways that can go and Ipswich have – and this has to go down as an error on their part – opted for the one where the performances and efforts become as bad as the results. The damn fools.

They are still, magnificently, the form side in the bottom three having picked up a whopping five points in their last 13 games, but that home defeat to Southampton really does feel like a day that sucked all the vitality from a hitherto very-much-alive relegation fight.

Slowly but surely the story of the season has switched from ‘generally competitive with the occasional paddling’ to the opposite with Ipswich having shipped four or more goals in four of their last eight games – and three of the last four at home.

The good news, we guess, is that they have at least avoided the full daft panic option of binning Kieran McKenna who, while enduring a chastening spell, remains far more likely than any sensible alternative to yo-yo Ipswich back up again next season, which is now very much the real quiz.

 

15) Manchester United (16)
The tanker is turning apparently after a seven-game unbeaten run that includes a penalty shoot-out defeat and only three actual wins against Real Sociedad (where United were actually quite good to be fair), Ipswich and Leicester.

The last actually half-decent team United have beaten is still Fulham back in January and before that Man City in December. There is still vanishingly little evidence they are actually good, just growing evidence that Bruno Fernandes is.

Maybe that’s harsh. They do look very slightly less bad now than they have for most of the season, and that does raise hopes of once again snatching success from a season of disaster by pocketing a trophy at the end of it. We very much enjoy the fact that the only unbeaten team in the Champions or Europa League this season is these idiots.

But really it’s still not good enough.

What we’re learning about this Man United team is that there are two sorts of games where they’re generally fine.

They can still call upon some ancient muscle memory from somewhere deep beneath Old Trafford and cosplay as a proper United team in the biggest games, having got results of various sorts against all their old rivals – Liverpool, Arsenal, City and Chelsea – who have now left them so decisively behind.

And they can also take out the trash, as shown with that near-flawless run through the Europa League to this point and picking up 16 points from a possible 18 against the worst bottom three in Premier League history.

But that leaves a vast middle ground of games against teams ranging from good to barely competent against whom United mainly lose. Maths fans may already have worked out that 16 points from six games against the bottom three means they’ve mustered only 21 from the remaining 23.

Southampton, Ipswich and Leicester account for 43% of United’s Premier League points this season and 50% of their Premier League wins. This isn’t living.

 

14) Chelsea (12)
Question: When is a four-match winning run not a four-match winning run? Answer: When two of the games are against Southampton and Leicester and the other two are in the Europa Conference.

Chelsea games have become increasingly odd spectacles, ones in which such concepts as ‘goals’ and ‘victories’ appear secondary to what have started to resemble oddly clinical training exercises built entirely around having the ball rather than ever actually doing anything interesting with it.

That this approach is very likely to end with Chelsea completing their collection of European pots and pans while also qualifying for the Champions League is a damning indictment of football across the country and indeed continent.

We’re also quite annoyed that Enzo Maresca did quite well for just long enough that everyone went ‘Fair play, we were wrong to doubt him’ before instantly setting about showing that everyone was in fact very correct to have doubted him. This is all becoming eerily similar to Leicester’s late-season bed-sh*tting from last year now.

READ: Ten reasons why this has been the worst Premier League season ever

 

13) Wolves (17)
Not their fault really that the powerful mid-season run that has pulled them decisively clear of the relegation zone amounts to 11 points from 11 games and that despite still rumbling along at less than a point per game they very probably don’t need a single one more to stay up with a quarter of the season still remaining.

But there’s decent reason to assume that at least two of the teams coming up from the Championship are going to be much less sh*t than any of the ones now heading back there, and that has to be a distinct worry for Wolves given how strikingly they remain worst of the rest.

 

12) Brentford (7)
We have very little further to say about Brentford beyond observing once again that a team collecting 22 of its first 23 points of the season at home and then instantly flicking a switch and picking up 16 of its next 18 points away is one of the Premier League’s finest ever bits of performance art.

We’re plebs and don’t really understand what wider point Brentford are trying to make with this season-long masterpiece, but we know deep down it is something very profound that speaks to the sheer futility of the human condition and the cruel indifference of the natural world.

What does any of that mean to the mood of a football club, though? Dunno really.

READ: Brentford and Thomas Frank: the genuinely ridiculous statistics of a remarkable success story

 

11) Fulham (10)
Have become just a very good team under Marco Silva and are a fully paid-up member of this season’s clutch of over-performing clubs from the traditional mid-table who approach the end of March with two viable routes to European football intact.

Fulham are above both Villa and Bournemouth in the league and very much still within striking range of the top five while also joining those two clubs as well as your Forests, your Palaces and the Brightons of this world among those whose final placings in the season-ending rehash of this feature could vary wildly depending on what becomes of an FA Cup that is either thrillingly wide open and there to be won by anybody or will be drearily won by Man City who won’t even be that arsed.

 

10) West Ham (13)
Be careful what you wish for, chorused the usual suspects as West Ham struggled in their brave new post-Moyes world, a refrain that only slightly ignored the fact that when West Ham fans asked for Moyesball to be replaced by something a teensy bit more watchable to get the blood pumping very few of them had a crankier more Spanish version of Moyes in mind.

Graham Potter is a much better fit for what the West Ham fans wanted and their self-perception. And there’s just enough about it to offer encouragement. Not really for this season, which is already a lower-mid-table write-off in which they are, along with Everton, supporting actors in the Spurs-and-Man United melodrama. But next season might be okay.

And there are plenty of other clubs who don’t have any real tangible reason to think that right now, so it’s not all bad for the Hammers really.

 

9) Arsenal (6)
Arsenal’s season, then. Has it been any good. Feels like this is a more complicated question to answer for the Gunners than anybody else in the league.

We must still acknowledge the possibility that Mikel Arteta and his strikerless sensations may yet uncomplicate things by winning the Champions League, but working as for now we must on the balance of probabilities that suggest this will not in fact be what happens, we’re left still with that same question.

Has this Arsenal season been any good? To quote Tim Lovejoy (not that one): short answer ‘yes’ with an ‘if’; long answer ‘no’ with a ‘but’.

We’re deeply sorry to inform you that you will be receiving the long answer.

This has to go down as a disappointing season for Arsenal, even if ends as seems extremely likely with another second-place finish.

The difference is one of expectations and starting points and, to be brutally honest, which other clubs have shuffled around in which directions around a water-treading Arsenal.

Arsenal have finished second in each of the last two seasons and it has been entirely straightforward to conclude those have, in the round, been successful campaigns. Finishing second at all in 2022/23 was a huge achievement for a team that ended the 21/22 season bottling fourth place to Antonio Conte’s Spurs.

Sure, they blew up on the home straight of the title race but they had put Arsenal back into a conversation from which they had been absent for far too long.

And then last season, despite the ultimate disappointment of finishing second to Man City again, still contained obvious, measurable development. Arsenal couldn’t reel City in during the run-in, but they did succeed in matching them. There was no bottling here and no amount of desperate banter-narrative construction could make it so.

Arsenal came up short again but the curve on the graph remained upward. The sense remained that Arsenal were on a journey towards their destination, with some by this stage even suggesting that arrival at said destination at some point in the near future was now inevitable.

We can only assume those people are not football fans and thus not possessed of the nagging voice in the back of the head that even in the good times is still telling you everything is going to go horribly wrong any minute.

Of course it wasn’t inevitable that Arsenal would win the league under Arteta, and now absolutely nobody is any longer pretending that is the case.

They absolutely could still win the league one day, but there is also now the very real possibility to consider that 2023/24 was the peak for this side and that the title-winning train has sailed.

There are reasons to be positive. For one thing, City are just about the only team in recent Barclays history who have managed to sustain three title-challenging seasons in a row. It is punishingly hard on the body and mind – of players and manager – to do so. Jurgen Klopp never did it, we shouldn’t be astonishing that Arteta couldn’t.

What Klopp’s sides could do was challenge again after a fallow season, and that will be the challenge for Arteta and co. in next season’s Premier League. It is a season that remains rich with potential. There are multiple reasons to suspect Liverpool will not be quite so good as they have been this year, and no certainties whatsoever around City or Newcastle or Chelsea or Villa. United and Spurs will almost certainly be less wretched than this season, almost by definition, but are surely way too far off to instantly mount any kind of meaningful challenge at the top end.

It may very well be that next year is Arsenal’s year. We told you this was ‘no’ with a ‘but’.

But what if it isn’t? What if this was the year. The year when City faltered, when Chelsea tried and failed again to marry world-class spending with world-class football, and when Liverpool were in year one of a new project with a new manager.

We’ve said this before, but it really does feel like the way Arsenal have had the rug pulled from beneath them by Liverpool this season makes it far harder to swallow.

At a simplistic level, the excuses and explanations – many of them valid – Arsenal fans told themselves to soothe themselves about losing out specifically to City are all blown out of the water when it is Liverpool under a new manager who have blown Arsenal away.

There is no 115-charges comfort blanket here.

And there is also no escaping the fact Arsenal’s football has become less attractive, more prosaic and worst of all more cynical this season. Injuries have played a huge part here, of course, with Martin Odegaard missed in the early part of the season but Bukayo Saka showing just why Arteta could never countenance being without him.

It turns out Saka wasn’t just the thing that made Odegaard and everyone else good, he was the thing that made Arsenal watchable. It’s no secret that Arsenal are a better side with Saka in it – this would be true of almost any football team on earth – but the extent to which any and all joy in their football appears to require his presence remains nevertheless alarming. Not every opponent is going to be PSV.

It’s not always true to say second place is first loser. But it’s not always false, either.

 

8) Bournemouth (5)
Nothing is f*cked, but the Cherries really have picked an inopportune moment to have one of their dodgy spells.

They have always under Andoni Iraola – for better or worse – been a streaky side, one equally capable of winning seven games in nine one minute and losing six out of seven the next.

But having put themselves firmly in Champions League contention with a 13-game run featuring eight wins and four draws, there has to be disappointment at following that with a run of just one point from four games against Wolves, Brighton, Tottenham and Brentford.

They might now have to just win the FA Cup instead in order to secure the European football their overall season has probably deserved. And we are still very much at a time in Bournemouth’s development where ending March as extremely plausible FA Cup winners and live outsiders for a European place via the league remains really very good indeed.

But gah, it really could and probably should have been better. Boffins could study that Spurs game in particular for centuries and still not come up with an explanation for how Bournemouth walked away with only a point.

 

7) Everton (8)
‘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?’

That was a month ago and there’s little sign of much significant change to the vibes even if Moyes’ early gameplan of winning all the games has now given way to the slightly less intoxicating ‘draw all the games’. It’s still fine, though.

When Moyes took over, all Everton wanted was to be able to enjoy giving Goodison Park the farewell it deserves in peace, without yet another fingernail-mashing relegation fight harshing the buzz.

This they have achieved with knobs on, while also rattling Liverpool into the quantum realm in the last Merseyside Derby at the grand old ground while of course being the one other fanbase that truly did unanimously enjoy Newcastle’s Carabao Cup win and having another chance to make Liverpool’s Premier League victory lap at least slightly nervy straight after the international break.

 

6) Liverpool (3)
It’s all a question of perspective, isn’t it? Liverpool fans are loudly telling us that this is still a great season and they are very happy thank you very much and this is both undeniably correct of them but also perhaps now if anything, Clive, almost too loud like it’s not actually us they’re trying to convince.

The question we find ourselves asking more and more as this season pauses to reflect before sprinting towards the finish line is: What next for Liverpool?

The short-term answer, and it’s a good one in fairness, is ‘They will win the Premier League and have a big f*ck-off party of their own’. And quite right too. They are going to do both of those things.

Still, though. An odd feeling about it all now, isn’t there? An unavoidable and extremely harsh but entirely human sense of anti-climax. Offered this exact season in August, every single Liverpool fan would obviously and immediately take it. You wouldn’t be able to move for all the bitten-off hands.

But offered this exact season six weeks ago, the answer would be entirely different. The hands would be less bitten. Quadruples are, by definition, long shots that almost never happen, but the dizzying speed with which a possible quadruple has been reduced to a mere single is still a bit of a headf*ck even if the single that remains is the very best single.

And there’s no doubt Liverpool have on occasion in recent weeks displayed a hitherto unseen vulnerability. The FA Cup shock at Plymouth could be dismissed for its sheer freakishness, and the league draws at Everton and Villa were never as disastrous as some giddy heads believed.

But they also weren’t great performances, and nor were either of Liverpool’s in the Champions League defeat to PSG. Or in an uncomfortably difficult home league win against what is quite possibly the worst Premier League team of all time. Or, now, in the Carabao Cup final.

In many ways, this was the most vexing of the lot. Even more so than the PSG non-performances. Liverpool are extremely good at cup finals that are not against Real Madrid, who have annoyingly and repeatedly proven themselves even better at cup finals.

After a League Cup final defeat to Man City a few months into Jurgen Klopp’s reign, he would never again lose a major final to anyone other than Real Madrid. Tottenham and most frequently Chelsea were all seen off one way or another, with UEFA Super Cup and a Club World Cup chucked in for good measure if you’re minded to include such things.

So for Liverpool’s first final under Arne Slot to produce such a complete pile of nothing where a plan and strategy and gameplan ought to have been has to be a bit of a concern.

With Trent Alexander-Arnold absent injured and Liverpool making the shock choice to replace Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah with holograms for the big day at Wembley, Sunday’s game also offered a glimpse at one potential future timeline if things go badly from this point with the Contract Three.

And what that glimpse showed us was a Liverpool team that is, well, distinctly ordinary.

This has been an unusual Premier League season. Liverpool have been very good and very consistent. They are worthy winners and yes we are trying to tread very carefully here. Because the question we now find ourselves asking is just how good are they?

The best team this season? Absolutely and without question. But they have achieved Man City-levels of dominance – and indeed Liverpool 2019/20 levels of dominance – and, well, we’re just not sure they’re actually anywhere near that level.

In summary: Liverpool are a very good side, and worthy champions. But that is all. They are very good, but they are not title-wrapped-up-in-March good. That, clearly, is far more of a criticism of Arsenal, Man City, Chelsea and the rest than it is of Liverpool, and we look forward to everyone definitely understanding this in the comments.

But it inevitably leaves us wondering what happens to Liverpool, to Arne Slot, after this season. It feels ever so slightly built on shifting sands until the futures of Van Dijk, Salah and Alexander-Arnold are resolved. It feels like Liverpool need to know what’s going on there, decisively, one way or another so that plans can be put into action.

One way or the other, Liverpool face an enormous summer. The continuity of playing staff that allowed the transition from Klopp to Slot to be so effortlessly smooth will not be repeated.

When Klopp was manager we were repeatedly guilty of underestimating Liverpool in the wake of one of their occasional fallow seasons. Is the danger now that people overestimate Slot’s. What if they just aren’t all that good once everyone else sorts themselves out? What if this isn’t the start of another great era.

Liverpool 2024/25 are not as good a football team as Liverpool 2018-2020 were. And that’s fine, nobody asked or expected them to be. But they really could be a one-and-done team rather than the start of a new legacy. There really might just have been some unfathomable alchemy in which Klopp’s squad and Slot’s steady hand could deliver one season of near-perfection, in the league at least.

But Klopp’s very best teams could misfire. Their points tallies in his peak years read 97, 99, 69, 92, 67, 82.

This year they’re going to get more than 82 and less than 97. Would anyone really be that surprised if next season it’s 60-odd again?

 

5) Aston Villa (4)
Couple of ways of looking at Aston Villa right now.

They are the Champions League and FA Cup quarter-finalists dreaming of their own drought-ending silverware propelled by the starry January additions of Marcus Rashford and Marco Asensio who have won their last four games in all competitions.

But they are also the team that has won only two of their last eight Premier League games and have slipped to ninth and in very real danger of missing out on European football altogether.

For the purposes of the Moods, we will mainly be looking at the former because that does seem to be where the general vibe is with Villa right now.

Those upcoming quarter-finals against equally dangerous foes in Preston and Paris St-Germain feel far more capable of defining Villa’s season than the league run-in.

Villa have undeniably and understandably struggled with the added demands this season of juggling European and domestic assignments. Their weekend form after European midweeks has been notoriously poor. They’re not the first and won’t be the last side to run into that particular wrinkle when stepping up to the Big Cup, but they have found it even harder than most.

But they wouldn’t now want to find themselves suddenly without those extra games to squeeze in. The likelihood is that PSG will prove a step too far in the Champions League. But it is likelihood rather than certainty, and Villa’s own progress to the semi-final of a very, very winnable FA Cup looks far more assured.

They really might need it, though, because if you look for even a moment beyond the headline dreams offered by the cup competitions there is no escaping the fact Villa’s Premier League run-in is distinctly ticklish.

Six of their next seven league games are against direct rivals for European qualification. The only teams currently placed between third and tenth who they won’t face between April 2 and May 10 are Chelsea and themselves.

And sure, the other game in that run is against Southampton – it’s after PSG away as well which is either the best or worst place for it depending on how empty you generally consider a half-full glass to be. And sure, the two games after that tricky run are against Tottenham and Manchester United who are also just awful. But still.

Villa’s season feels in many ways the most thrillingly teetering of those not being carried out by the confirmed basket-case clubs. It could yet end in spectacular glory or drab anti-climax, and it’s really not at all clear at this stage which it will be.

 

4) Crystal Palace (9)
They are going to absolutely smash the 50-point barrier. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility they take down the 60-point barrier.

If you’re us and literally nobody else on earth, this is the single-most important thing that has happened all season. If it were our mood we were interested in, Palace would be top of the pile.

It’s far better than winning a Carabao to end a 70-year wait for meaningful domestic silverware and we will not be persuaded otherwise. Although we will grudgingly accept Palace’s fans might be more excited by the idea of winning the FA Cup.

Still, the fact they’re on for a record-breaking league season and could still win the FA Cup is enough to tell you that things are pretty, pretty, pretty good for Palace anyway, and they continue to climb this table even if their march up the actual league table has somewhat stalled despite the continued impressive results.

It’s seven wins and a draw in the last 10 league games for Palace now, which would be enough to get through that 60-point mark if they can replicate it for the remaining 10.

They do have to go to the Etihad, St James’ Park, the Emirates and Anfield during that time, but we believe in Oliver Glasner and we believe in Crystal Palace.

 

3) Brighton (11)
An absurd 7-0 defeat at Nottingham Forest at the start of February on the back of a home defeat to Everton really did suggest Brighton were having another season like so many other Brighton seasons in which grand early excitement and promise evaporates into quietly impressive but undeniably underwhelming mid-table nothingness by the end of it all.

Yet since that absurd 7-0 defeat at Nottingham Forest at the start of February, Brighton have won six games out of seven and drawn the other at Manchester City which even in these unusual times is still broadly fine. Only Liverpool are in better form.

They’ve sorted out Newcastle in the FA Cup – an achievement that takes on greater depth in light of what happened at the weekend as well as beating Chelsea in two competitions and other notable wins against some of the Premier League’s most determinedly Not Sh*t teams this season in Bournemouth and Fulham.

Far from slipping back into mid-table they now sit just a point outside the Champions League places with absolutely no real evidence to suggest any one of the teams around them is particularly more likely than Brighton to hoover up enough points to get over the line.

And they’re also key members of the Could Do A Newcastle, You Know brigade that dominates the last eight of the FA Cup.

All looking very good indeed, which means that by the next time we update this they will be out of the FA Cup and 11th somehow.

 

2) Nottingham Forest (2)
And still the unlikeliest league season since Leicester’s 2015/16 behaviour rumbles ever onward, with the Champions League now so close they can almost taste the Gazprom.

What’s great about this Forest season – apart from ‘pretty much everything about it’ for Forest fans themselves – is that it hasn’t been completely plain sailing. They have toyed with us all.

More than once there has been a moment where you think the bubble has burst and reality is going to come flooding out. And every time Nuno Espirito Santo’s side respond and come again, and every time when the dust settles there they still are in third, still not yet reeled in by the knot of massive clubs just behind them in the league.

When they lost 5-0 at Bournemouth, they simply instantly won 7-0 against Brighton.

When they lost consecutive games at Fulham and Newcastle with Arsenal and Man City up next, they simply took four points off Arsenal and Man City without conceding a goal. Then they dismantled Ipswich because that’s pretty much what everyone does now, alas.

And after it all, there they sit, closer to Arsenal directly above them than to Chelsea directly below them. The gap to sixth place – the gap that matters – now stands at seven points.

They are no longer a team that could qualify for the Champions League, but one that should. Especially with a run-in that really should hold few fears. They don’t have to worry about either of the teams above them now, or Man City.

Forest only have one game in their remaining nine against a team currently in the top six, and even that’s a) Chelsea, who are now real sh*t, and b) on the last day of the season when it very well not matter anyway.

That’s more than enough to keep them riding high in the moods before we even get round to the fact that they remain one of a whole bunch of teams for whom the FA Cup now represents a glorious chance to Do A Newcastle.

 

1) Newcastle United (1)
We obviously knew Newcastle were going to be number one on this update, but had clean forgotten we’d already sent them soaring into top spot from a lowly 12th in the last one.

At which point we said this:

‘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.’

The less said about the league games against Man City and Liverpool the better, while it wouldn’t do to dwell too long either on the FA Cup game against Brighton.

They did beat Forest and West Ham to remain in very plausible Champions League contention. But even if they’d lost both those games and been hit with a 10-point penalty because the Premier League had decided to issue a ban on striped kits, Newcastle would still top the rankings.

Fifty-six years they’ve waited for a trophy, and 70 years for a domestic pot. Their current wait for such a thing now stands at three days.

Carabao must be delighted. Never before has the League Cup felt like such a major trophy. There really is no doubt that This Means More to Newcastle than it ever could to Liverpool, whose own agonising one-year trophy drought will end in May anyway.

And not that it would’ve mattered much how they won it, the fact they won it so impressively, utterly dominating Liverpool from first whistle to (almost) last can only make it sweeter. There really are a lot of wonderful players at Newcastle now doing a wonderful job, with Alexander Isak now genuinely rivalling and this season probably beating Erling Haaland for the coveted Best Proper Striker In The League award while Sandro Tonali, Joelinton and Bruno Guimaraes has grown into a midfield combination to go toe-to-toe with anything anyone else has to offer.

And then there’s Big Dan Burn with his Big Headed Goals and Big England Call-up.

So yes, the mood is high at Newcastle, and it would be no surprise now to see them ride this wave for the next couple of months to a top-five finish and with it Champions League football.

There is, though, one potential source of concern. Newcastle fans believe themselves to be very special. It’s not their fault, they’ve been spoiled and coddled and tickled under the chin by all branches of the football media in this country for decades now. It would be weirder if the fans didn’t believe it.

The general softness of the media towards Newcastle and the desperate thirst of the fans for any kind of success are just two of the reasons why the Saudis couldn’t have picked a better club for their sportswashing project, with leading client journalists eagerly doing the sportswashing for them as we speak by loudly insisting Newcastle’s success is not at all about the owners and of course it’s only right and proper they have an Alexander Isak and they would definitely have had an Alexander Isak anyway because they deserve it so much.

Actual real Newcastle fans still don’t really give a sh*t at this time of great joy, but their large media fanbase is learning apparently in real time that not everyone is as delighted for them as they’d assumed, bizarrely conflating not sharing Newcastle’s joy at winning a trophy after all this time with not understanding it.

Everyone understands it’s a big deal for Newcastle. Nobody is struggling with that. But not everyone shares that joy. This is very much a Newcastle thing and not a trophy-drought thing as well. If and when Spurs ever win a trophy again several decades from now, nobody will write confused thinkpieces expressing their bafflement at the fact this event has not been greeted with unanimous joy throughout the land.

And the ‘one-club city’ thing doesn’t make much sense either, because it also applies to Leeds and absolutely nobody asks or expects anyone else to like them.

Newcastle do place a lot of stock in their largely fictitious status as a club and fanbase beloved by all, and nothing – not even welcoming human-rights abusers as owners – has shifted the needle on that. But the one thing that will shift it, is being successful.

You can have a confected idea of your own popularity among rival fans or you can be successful. But you can’t really have the latter without pricking the bubble of the first.

Newcastle fans absolutely should not care because as they are now joyfully discovering success is better than some self-mythologising popularity, but the pained confusion at this being laid bare is definitely there.

READ: Newcastle dopamine hit will only sustain Isak and Guimaraes for now…