With a win that will be remembered forever, Chelsea snatched 3 points from nowhere against Manchester United on Thursday night and gave a jolt of life back to a season that was about to expire.
Without our league battle, all we have to play for is a menacing FA Cup semi final against Manchester City. And given how we bottled the EFL Cup final against Liverpool, even beating City won’t convince us that we’re close to a trophy there.
More important is our league form, with things getting incredibly tight in the Premier League table.
If you’re going to be live football betting on our final position this season, you’ve got a lot to think about. Between 6th placed Man U (48 pts) and 13th placed Fulham (39 pts) things are so tight that just a couple of wins or losses changes the picture rapidly. We have a game in hand on most of those teams, and 2 games in hand on others.
Our fixtures also make things hard to predict – Sheffield United and Everton at home should be comfortable wins. But then Arsenal, Aston Villa and Tottenham consecutively looks nasty.
On the other hand, we’ve often played better in our games against the big teams so far this season. We’re so unpredictable in terms of performance and results that we feel as likely to drop points against the bad teams are we are to pick up results against good teams.
Of course there’s no point looking backwards now, but it does make those insanely frustrating dropped points of a week ago against Burnley hurt even more. If we keep that equaliser out, we’re already on 45 points, sitting in 7th place.
But what you can’t deny is that we should have an exciting end to the season coming up, especially if we get ourselves into position with an easy win over Sheffield United tomorrow. Unlike last season, where this final run of games was an agonising, interminable and pointless trudge to the finish line, this campaign looks like it will have something on the line all the way to the finish.
It may not be the title race we were all hoping for, but it’s an advance on last year, and we can only hope we build on it again in next season. First comes a very important and unique summer though, and before that this run in which decides a lot about which players will be available to us.