Here’s what’s happening in the Premier League. Today!!! Well, yesterday and Saturday really. Which can basically be summed up in one simple sentence. Ready? It reads: everyone fucked up, except Manchester City. Possibly Aston Villa. 2 sentences. Sue me. For every other team (maybe not the ones who won, but we’ll include them for the sake of ‘art’), this weekend was The Catastrophe. It’s almost like 19 teams lost and Manchester City won, beating them all. A kind of metaphor for the season, really. For most of the seasons since Abu Dhabi bought Manchester’s (long-way) second favourite team and turned them into world-beating, treble-winning, league-dominating superheroes (subject to 105 law suits regarding financial irregularities; they might take it all back).

The weekend’s fixtures started with my beloved Tottingham Hotspurs traveling up to St James’s Park, all the way to Newcastle upon Tyne. The shouldn’t have bothered. Its become a terrible place for my team, bad vibes, dodgy omens, evil spirits, Newcastle Brown, Lindisfarne, the ghost of Alan Shearer poisoning the environment. How are we supposed to play in that??? So we didn’t and got trounced. Don’t want to talk about it.

Because there was too much excitement happening on Sunday!!! With Manchester City (see above, horrible, rancid, money-laundering, etc) thrashing lowly Luton on Saturday, yesterday was the day that both Liverpool and Arsenal needed to win to keep the title race nail-bitingly tight and a proper three-horse-race. Alas, those two horses both fell at the first and had to be put down.

Both Liverpool and Arsenal had home games. Ok, every match is tricky, but playing Crystal Palace at Anfield is not a game worth even betting on, the odds on a Liverpool win being so short. Whereas putting money on Palace would have earned you a few bob, as it transpired. The people of Liverpool are (once again) demanding a public inquiry. Quite rightly so.

So it was all to play for at the Emirates in the late kick-off. Arsenal, who needed to win to go back to the top by one point, playing Aston Villa, who are Spurs main contenders for the vital ‘4th place’ for a Champions League entry next season. So who did I wish to lose it? Villa, to further my (often hapless) team’s chances? Or Arsenal? Because the thought of them winning the league and the ensuing lectures on ‘the art and beauty of football as exemplified by the best team in the land’ by the Arsenal faithful for then next decade, is just too much incitement to murder.

Anyway, its football, not a fucking democracy. You don’t get to vote who wins, it just happens. And it happened that Villa won, quite brilliantly as it turned out. Condemning the Arse to second place, 2 points behind City. Only 2 points, yes, but its the ‘behind City’ which kills you.

So is that ‘it’ now? Do we just crown Rhodri and Sheikh Mansoor tomorrow? Oh, there’s 6 more games to play! Who knew?

Happy Monday, for some.

A xxxx