Five key players from the Premier League run-in managers found down the back of the sofa

This was always going to be a challenging season for lots of reasons, not least of which being the sheer amount of football that would have to be squeezed into April and May to make room for a whole-ass World Cup before Christmas.

It was always going to stretch squads to their limits and throw up some unlikely heroes when the season finally hit that long home straight approximately eight or nine years after it began (subs please check).

Here are five such heroes…

Curtis Jones (Liverpool)
It’s pretty rare for a bit-part player’s sudden prominence to coincide as neatly with a huge improvement in a team’s general form as Curtis Jones’ new-found importance at Liverpool.

While he’d been involved here and there earlier in the season – including, it must be noted, a full 90 minutes in defeat at Nottingham Forest on his only pre-World Cup start in the Premier League – it’s only in recent weeks he’s become a regular.

Heading into April, Jones had played a grand total of 20 Premier League minutes in 2023 spread across three games. Then he started the goalless draw against Chelsea and has been in the first XI ever since. That’s seven starts in a row, and in those seven games Liverpool have won five (scoring 16 goals in the process) and drawn the other two.

Maybe Jurgen Klopp can count on him.

Jacob Murphy (Newcastle)
Can you find a player down the back of the sofa if that player has in fact appeared in every single Premier League game of the season? Probably not to be fair but also: shut up.

Yes, Murphy has technically appeared in every game of the season, but until recent weeks these were largely substitute appearances and often brief ones at that. Nineteen of Murphy’s appearances in Newcastle’s first 24 games were under half an hour, 10 of those 19 under 10 minutes. Since then he’s played at least 45 minutes in eight games out of nine. And in those nine games, Newcastle have picked up eight wins and almost certainly secured a Champions League spot that appeared to be slipping away in a run of one win in eight games where Murphy’s involvement amounted to no starts and barely 90 minutes all told.

Caglar Soyuncu (Leicester)
We humbly contend that if Leicester had spent more of this season picking Caglar Soyuncu and Daniel Iversen instead of mucking about having Danny Ward and Daniel Amartey in their starting line-up for the lols then they might not find themselves quite so deeply in the relegation excrement. As it is, they’re…