They say that fourth is the new first, which I suppose makes a change from fourth being the new black, or the new rock ’n’ roll. Still doesn’t make it any less ludicrous.

With the title having been decided months before Arsenal applied the final rapier thrust, and the relegation places seemingly set in stone no matter how many times Manchester City continue to fuck up, what little fun there is left in this wretched season lies in seeing which one of the Premiership’s assorted deadbeats can stumble down the home straight and exhaustedly breast the tape, like your man in the final reel of Chariots Of Fire, to take that final Champions League place.
At the time of writing, apparently any team between fourth and eleventh has a mathematical chance of getting that spot. That’s nearly half the fucking table. Even Southampton could still do it, amazingly, though this would require a long series of fairly unlikely results and, probably, the involvement of Malaysian bookies.
It’s almost like watching a cycling peloton with half a second separating 70 or 80 riders, except this is a peloton where there are about five or six crashes every couple of seconds.
Take Liverpool (please). If you treated yourself to watching a few of Liverpool’s games without knowing who they were or where they were in the table, you would presume them to be a bottom-six side at best.
Before they beat Man United the other week, in the most god-awful excuse for a football match Foul Play has witnessed since the first round of Italia 90, they had taken five points from the previous 15. Yet they were still fourth, despite the fact that in terms of their points total, they were closer to the teams occupying the relegation places than they were to United.
Only when that annoying, useless little bastard Danny Murphy thumped his penalty past Tim Howard, did the worm turn and Liverpool inch a little further towards the Firth of Fourth.
This, let’s not forget, is a pretty bad United side, yet it has occupied second place for most of the season and may yet finish there. But I digress. Look at the ocean of crud below them. The worst Liverpool side since Souness was in charge. Birmingham, who can’t score a goal apart from Forssell. Fulham, the walking embodiment of mediocrity. Charlton, the most patronised football club in history, forever being patted on the head for not finishing twentieth. Aston Villa. Aston Villa.
People keep going on about the Newcastle-Liverpool game on the final day of the season, and how it will decide once and for all who finishes fourth. It would actually be deeply amusing to see a re-run of what happened a year ago, when Newcastle broke their bollocks to get fourth place and then threw it all away by losing at home to Partizan Belgrade in the qualifiers last August. But Foul Play is starting to think that Aston Villa’s unlikely late surge may render that fixture a soporific irrelevance.
I am writing this before Villa’s weekend game with Spurs, who have stank the place out this season and may yet go down. What is the difference between Villa and Spurs, in real terms? It’s certainly not extra money. Nor is it a huge variation in the strength of the respective playing staffs.
You could argue that, in David O’Leary, Villa have someone vaguely resembling a competent manager, while in David Pleat, Tottenham are saddled with one of the biggest chancers in the game. O’Leary has indeed fashioned, if not quite a silk purse, then certainly a durable rucksack out of the meat-and-potatoes players he has had to work with. He has also made a couple of half-decent signings, such as Nolberto Solano and Gavin McCann. But the main difference is that while both teams have bumbled along pretty anonymously for the vast majority of the season, Tottenham have decided to take the final three months of the campaign off, whereas Villa haven’t.
I know a fellow who reckons that if Villa reach the Champions League, they will not only get through the qualifying round but will then proceed to reach the last four. It’s sometimes hard to tell with this guy whether he’s being serious or not. But, goddammit, in a world where Southampton can still have a chance of a Champions League spot despite being in the bottom half of the table, in a world where Arsenal can go undefeated all season despite having no full-backs and a raving psychopath in goal, why the hell not?
Aston Villa. In the Champions League. Don’t you just love English football sometimes?