they look knackered and now go Sunday (man city) - Thursday (UEFA) - Sunday (West ham) I can see them struggling for a while here & getting sucked right back into top 4 race before they know it. City will be fresh with 4/5 changes for Sunday & hard to see united getting more than a point
I think I mentioned to you in the autumn I could see this season being very very tight. I haven't looked into it, but I'd imagine the gap between say 2nd to 10th will never have been tighter. I did something around half way through, and basically if you took the 1-4, 1-6 & 1-8 measurements across 25 season it was like 5 occasions where it had been tighter at any of those categories.
Whats happened since, is City have emerged as an elite team. I think we both said, really only City or Liverpool had the sort of run in them City have produced. You kind of get the sense City were a year or 2 ahead of Liverpool in their journey, so it was either going to be like a Liverpool final swansong for this team, or City's next evolution would be a bit quicker. I mean fair is fair, I didn't think we would see an elite team this season, so while I got Liverpool right, I felt we'd only see what City are doing now next season.
What is noteworthy is that that the season hasn't broken into groupings at all. You kind of thought, approaching 10 games left that it would be clear who are challenging for the title, who were top 4, who weregoing for Europa League and who weretrying to hold position inthe top half. Outside of the title challenger (as nobody will get close) they are all melded in together. There have no doubt been some short term factors (injuries for Leicester) but it's always seemed to be, once a team has got themselves into a great position, they haven't quite kicked on. We are probably in that bracket too. So it's made for a really fascinating season.
You rightly pointed out about European games. In fairness aside from City (who also really only kicked in quite a big into that no European game run) none of the sides have really pulled away and put that distance between the "top 6" and "the rest" when they had the European break. What that shows to me, in my view of course, is that actually the reverse may be true, and they may end up having some real fatigue challenges at the back end. Like if you can't make hay while everyone if fatigued, good luck when you get more fatigued and the rest of the league stay fresh.
I do think as I said last time there's a medium term issue here too. The top 6 was being caught before the pandemic, and given it has impacted them disproportionately more than other sides you can see a closing up of the gap. Cotrary to certain reports, I also think fans returning will help the sides outside of the big 6 as a rule, as they tend to rely on fans a little more for home advantage (the chaos of fans is in essence a bit of an equaliser).
So it's certainly interesting, and I wouldn't rule out United grinding to a bit of a halt with the European games being unrelenting, and undoubtedly pressures around the international games growing too.
