Handing out or ripping up contracts and winning 4-0

Nobody’s perfect, everyone makes mistake. Even the Premier League clubs who are doing splendidly haven’t got every decision right.

So having congratulated every club for their most correct decision of the season it’s only fair that we now slap them in their stupid faces for their biggest errors. We’ll warn you now, some of these are a stretch.

Arsenal – Going eight points clear
Okay, so we’re off to a bad start here but there haven’t been many bad decisions at Arsenal this season. There was one, but the lawyers don’t want us to talk about that. So we’ll have to go for this. Because what Arsenal have done this season, like absolute f**kwits, is go so far clear at the top of the table that losing the title to Manchester City in accordance with the prophecy will now go down as a bottle job. The fact they’ve opened up that sweet-spot lead that is both large yet also surmountable while still having two games to play against City only makes it sillier. Stay in your lane and fight Brighton for sixth, you damn fools.

Aston Villa – The Tyrone Mings Captaincy Caper
Steven Gerrard’s big powerplay at the start of the season, given that Mings has now started 90 per cent of Villa’s Premier League games this season and Gerrard is sacked and little lamented, didn’t pay off. Gerrard lurched from stripping Mings of the armband in July and publicly calling out the defender, to leaving him out of a honking 2-0 defeat at Bournemouth over apparent concerns over the England international’s consistency, to almost immediately recalling him and claiming credit for Mings still being a quite good Premier League defender.

It also just felt incredibly performative from Gerrard, like he was cosplaying seasoned alpha manager, and by September Mings’ form had Gerrard claiming that his public criticism had been entitled to take attention away from Mings and allow “Tyrone… to focus on Tyrone”, which was a pretty brazen rewriting of the events of July and August.

Bournemouth – Giving Gary O’Neil a permanent contract
Bournemouth picked up 13 of their 17 points this season during the 11 games of O’Neill’s caretaker reign. They’ve got one point from five games since handing him the job permanently during the World Cup break.

Their overall current league run is eight defeats in the last 10 games. Wanting the air of permanence is understandable but in truth the air had already gone out of Bournemouth’s new manager bounce by the time…