Ranking the relegation candidates by how much we’d like them to go down
It’s a beautiful sunny, spring-like morning here. The kind that makes you think you might just have made it through another winter and starts you thinking about long summer days, beer gardens and throwing pints in the air when England equalise against Denmark.
So naturally our thoughts this morning are ‘Is it c*ntish to rank the relegation battlers in order of how much we’d like them to go down?’
We came swiftly to a conclusion: yes, but when has that ever stopped us before? Never is the answer. Or at least rarely. So here we go.
Now we’re not going to worry ourselves about Sheffield United or Burnley. Our thoughts on those two are irrelevant. They’re gone, unless there are several more hefty points penalties heading to multiple teams.
We’re also not going to venture too far into fantasyland in the other direction. Much as we’d all like to see Chelsea get relegated and much as we’d all like to make whimsy about how they’ve not yet reached the 40-point barrier, it’s also not going to happen. At least, not this season.
There’s a six-point gap from 13th-placed Bournemouth to 14th-placed Crystal Palace and that strikes us as a reasonable cut-off point. Bournemouth are definitely safe with 35 points and don’t go on the list. Palace should be safe, but with 29 points they aren’t quite there yet. So they do go on our list.
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5) Luton
Obviously. Of course they can stay, the adorable little ragamuffins that they are. We will of course eventually tire of patting them condescendingly on the head and admiring their funny little ground and then we’ll have a spell of getting annoyed at other people who are still patting them condescendingly on the head and admiring their funny little ground and eventually we will want them cast from the Barclays for taking up a place that could go to one of yer da’s proper top-flight clubs like Sheffield Wednesday. They must be better, mustn’t they? <Checks league tables> Ooof, f***. Still, though.
But that’s all really quite some time in the future. For now and surely at least another potential year or two, Luton are a great and welcome addition to Our League with their hilarious propensity for scoring last-minute equalisers to ruffle some mid-table feathers and conceding last-minute winners that ensure, crucially, that while they might be awkward for the big teams they do stop short of actually beating them because that kind of uppity nonsense does not play well.
Great story, great Barclays, handsome young manager. Lovely. They can definitely stay. Knock some more points off whoever you must to make it so.
4) Crystal Palace
Now ordinarily we wouldn’t be averse to losing Palace, because we are really very bored of them. But also they have just hired Oliver Glasner and, curse their hides, that’s piqued our interest again. Appointing a highly-rated Austrian manager who has ideas and looks precisely like Marty McFly’s dad when he’s all successful at the end of Back to the Future might be genuinely interesting behaviour from a club that has hitherto devoted itself thoroughly and stoically to the dreariest lower mid-table existence imaginable and panic-sacked any manager who threatened however briefly to shake them out of that mundanity in either direction.
So Glasner might not last long, but while he’s there, we’re interested. Can he finally be the manager to deliver a Palace season in which they don’t finish somewhere between 11th and 15th with a points total in the 40s? Let’s hope so. Because if he isn’t, they’re going to be very, very prominent in this unnecessarily cruel and unpleasant feature a year from now.
3) Brentford
The ‘Ivan Toney as Football Jesus’ storyline around his comeback from suspension gave us the ick, but Brentford are generally not a bad bunch of lads and we wish them no particular ill will.
As long as we get a cast-iron guarantee that Heir of Lamela Neal Maupay will still be in the Barclays next season in some active capacity rather than wasting away pointlessly on Everton’s bench, we wouldn’t necessarily mourn Brentford’s return to the Championship but nor is it an outcome we particularly crave.
We must admit to being quite titillated by the prospect of watching Maupay sh*thouse the entire division into furious oblivion while accidentally getting himself relegated in the process, but it’s not our preferred outcome. Not this season, anyway.
2) Nottingham Forest
We don’t like that this is where we’ve been dragged by Nottingham Forest, because it is a club we generally quite like and is a favourite of a couple of notable ex-365ers who are still talking to us despite all the weird messages we left them when they abandoned us, the Judas turncoat pricks.
But Forest are just too relentlessly silly in too many ways and really it feels like the only way they’re going to learn any kind of lesson is by getting relegated. We know now at least that the punishment for their off-field silliness is four points. Or at least, we know it’s that until it isn’t, what with appeals and such. But let’s pretend. Four points. Definitely.
Now let’s see how that compares with how many points they have penalised themselves on the field because they simply refuse to learn. We don’t even support Forest and the sight of them leading Luton and being in full control only to take off all their attacking players, invite Luton back into the game and then look astonished when the team that scores late equalisers manages to score a late equaliser AND THEN DOING PRECISELY THE SAME THING UNDER A DIFFERENT MANAGER A FEW MONTHS LATER genuinely enraged us. Dread to think what Forest fans made of it.
Absolute idiots. The club that is, not the fans. Lots of time for the fans. Even the ones who didn’t used to work here.
1) Everton
Yeah, get them gone. It’s frankly an act of mercy by this stage. A kindness. Put them out of their misery.
We know, we know, great club yadda yadda, long-suffering fanbase etc. etc. top flight since the dawn of time or whatever. That’s why they have to go, to be honest. We genuinely think it’s for their own good.
With so little else to shout about, Everton have become driven almost entirely by this long unbroken stint of top-flight football of which, fair enough, they are justifiably proud. But they’ve been taking the p*ss for huge chunks of the Premier League years, and survival at all costs is becoming an albatross.
Rip off the plaster, take a year in the Championship, win a load of games, reset and come back stronger or at least reinvigorated. Enough of this last-gasp clinging-on-by-the-fingernails survival treadmill. It’s a bit that was already becoming old hat by the end of the 90s and nobody really wants a 90s revival now thank you very much.
We’re really quite surprisingly close to convincing ourselves we’re being cruel to be kind here rather than simply cruel to be cruel, but we do think there is something to be said for a fresh start and removing the millstone of history that hangs so heavy over every new and exhausting Everton relegation fight.