It’s great how much the mood around the Premier League can change in a month. Sometimes things can seem to be going broadly okay, and then BANG, you get knocked out of two cups by mediocre opposition and your flailing and failing manager announces the entire club is a prick that will never be any less of a prick.
Or things can be going bad and then keep going bad until you find yourself with apparently no option but to reappoint the ancient man you were rightly delighted to have moved on from a couple of years ago.
Or you can just keep winning game after game after game – often in absurdly unlikely and thrilling style – in pursuit of a league title that absolutely nobody thought was remotely feasible when the season began approximately 473 years ago.
It really, truly is a funny old game.
Here’s where we were in February, and those are the numbers in brackets…
20) Crystal Palace (14)
It’s all gone horribly grim and Patrick Vieira, who last season really appeared to be building something a bit special at Palace, has paid with his job. Now they have brought Roy Hodgson back, which feels like the most monumentally depressingly retrograde step any football club could take.
Last year Palace were righteously celebrating the raised ceiling provided by Vieira’s more progressive, less pragmatic (read: dull) brand of football. It all went to shit, but surely this isn’t the answer. As much as anything else, Hodgson is now 75 years old. Come on.
Also, while Vieira did have to go, Palace’s 2023 fixture list has been insane. We’ve not checked, obviously, but it must be unprecedented: they are currently still 12th in the Premier League despite failing to win any of their last 12 league games, but those 12 games have also been played exclusively against the 11 teams above them in the table. They’ve faced 10 of them once and Manchester United twice, culminating in a grim 4-1 paddling at Arsenal.
Surely no team as high as 12th can ever have had anything like such a run without facing at least someone worse than them. After that absurdly harrowing January-March run comes a six-game April that will define Palace’s season: all six of those games are, unsurprisingly really, against teams below them in the table: Leicester, Leeds, Southampton, Everton, Wolves, West Ham.
Don’t f*** it up, Roy.
19) Tottenham (8)
Beyond hilarious that they are still fourth in the league and would have been third had they managed to beat…
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