what a fitting end to the season. a campaign that featured five genuinely poor sides saw the four that could have been relegated on the final day lose on the final day, barely a pulse between them. newcastle didn't register a shot on target during the second half yesterday, a damning indictment of both their playing staff and the inadequacy of their management team; hull were comfortably beaten by alex ferguson's fourth or fifth best eleven; middlesbrough were brushed aside by a west ham side playing for ninth place; sunderland, who at least scored a couple of goals, nonetheless suffered a straightforward defeat to chelsea.
"teams in the bottom three after 38 games deserve to go down" said a disconsolate alan shearer last night, and whilst the newcastle manager's ability to utter the most banal, unnecessary truisms remains unsurpassed, such a comment doesn't really do the premiership's relegation battle justice. when there are 6 teams of such desperate quality, it isn't quite sufficient to merely talk about the three worst. why should we? should we be acceptant and congratulatory towards a hull side that won 8 points after boxing day? or a sunderland side that picked up 6 points in the last 13 games? there is no sense in being polite: these were two teams that stayed up merely on the grounds that they were the least diabolical. this is no achievement.
similarly, despite their brilliant time this year, fulham had little business staying in the top tier last season. bolton were little better. and despite spending relatively unheard of sums for a promoted side, roy keane's sunderland were ultimately a poor side. this is a simple equation, some might say, and they may be right: as mourinho's chelsea raised the bar for league champions, and catalysed the rest of the big four to get even better, so the bad teams performed even worse: there are only so many points to go round, and more wins for the big teams equal less for the worst.
but this is surely making the premier league a less attractive proposition: by accomodating too many hopeless sides, we unnecessarily lower the quality of the league, spreading the television money too thinly and putting up with too many mediocre fixtures in a season already congested enough. reduce the league to eighteen and although the points disparity may be as consistent as ever, you increase your chances of better, more thrilling football. to maintain tv revenue you would need to lose a saturday 3pm fixture (so in effect increasing the proportion of fixtures screened live, even if the number of games on tv don't increase in real terms). you could even accomodate a two week winter break or something, perhaps prior to christmas. sacre bleu!
certainly, it would be worth trying, if only to escape any more teams of the quality of hull's remaining in the "premier" league, although admittedly it would be something difficult to persuade every chairman to accept, given that for one season only it would require a further two teams dropping out (or two forgoing their "right" to be promoted). perhaps reorganising both the championship and the premier league into two smaller divisions would be better, streamlining the crap from the championship, cutting the slog of fixtures that make it difficult to be anything but a bustling, depressing, grinding physical side, encouraging better football, making more money from revenues and ultimately getting a better standard of football. if we had a smaller second tier, one that played better football than its current incarnation and therefore made more money, you might decrease the surfeit of substandard teams that ultimately emerge from its part-luck part-endurance football purgatory.
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