WHY SAY ANYTHING?

We here at WSA recently had a spare five minutes which we filled by playing the Daily Mirror top six predictor game, (it’s here if you want to try it out).

It’s quite simple really, all you do is enter whether you think the top six will win, lose or draw their remaining games and the widget calculates the rest. Our final table had Chelsea as champions, Manchester City second and Manchester United third. Tottenham edged out Arsenal and Liverpool for the fourth spot.

There was probably a small amount of bias towards United but we do think we performed the operation as fairly as is humanly possible as a supporter of one of the clubs in question. If we were REALLY biased we would have wangled it so that United were champions!

This season the race for the top four, (or more realistically the second, third and fourth places), is possibly the most exciting. Something on a seismic level needs to happen to Chelsea for them to snatch defeat from the jaws of this particular victory and it probably won’t happen. There are rarely any major cock-ups when you need them!

Second place is in the hands of Manchester City and only Pep Guardiola, another first timer in the Premier League along with Antonio Conte, can change this. His erratic selection policy and penchant for goalkeepers who aren’t very good could still be his team’s downfall come the end of the season. We can’t see them dropping out of the top four altogether though.

Manchester United have found some form. It’s probably more truthful to say that José Mourinho has badgered and cajoled the players into some decent performances, a feat which was, in the main, beyond the likes of Louis van Gaal and David Moyes. In fact Moyes is still finding it beyond him even since he left United with Real Sociedad sacking him and Sunderland about to do the same.

If United can continue their current form it should be enough to lift them into a third place finish.

Fourth place is a bit of a lottery. Our predictor placed Tottenham above both Arsenal and Liverpool but it is by no means a certainty that it will actually finish that way. All three are inconsistent.

Liverpool find it quite easy to raise their game and beat teams such as Spurs, but can’t beat Burnley or Leicester City, for example.

Tottenham can play very well and beat the likes of Manchester City, but then lose at home to Gent, a Belgian team unknown outside of Gent. The fact that Spurs weren’t good enough for either the Champion’s League or the Europa League means that they shouldn’t really be good enough for the top four, but they may just scrape in.

Arsenal are just Arsenal. The sad possibility this year, if you’re an Arsenal fan, is that they could finish outside of the top four for the first time in the history of the world ever. Inconsistency has consistently been the downfall of the Gunners and this season will be no different.

Pathetic, once again, in the Champion’s League, we can only hope that they can find it in themselves to qualify, yet again, for that tournament they never look like winning. This year though, it will possibly be a bridge too far.

So our top six for the end of the season looked like this:

 
Let’s see how accurate this “predictor” really is. We don’t have sufficient confidence in the process to place any bets on the outcome but you never know, it could be awesome.