Premier League Review - Arsenal and Leicester take advantage

Barring an intervention from one of the gods who are proposed to exist, it seems almost certain that 2015 will soon turn to 2016. As such, it provides a handy point to stop, cogitate, and listen. To review all that has come in the last year and wonder where it leaves us. We can have a look at the highs and lows of football, and the Premier League in particular, and wonder if it has solved the ills of capitalism, of ISIS, of human greed and diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. We can quickly conclude that it has done nothing to help any of these situations, and in the cases of capitalism and greed, it might just have exacerbated things a little bit with its relentless, till-ringing, one-arm-bandit-dining, cash and debt jamboree.

What it did do, though, is distract us from all the ongoing and nascent misery in the world, and for that we can be thankful. There have always been clubs and players to laugh at, the occasional club and player worth praising for their exceptional abilities and achievements, and then some more clubs and players to laugh at.

It’s harder to know out of Chelsea and Manchester United, who have had the most hilarious year. It has actually got so farcical at times for both of these clubs that even supporters of one or the other has started to take a sick thrill in just how low and inept they can become.

Chelsea started the year in charge of the title race. After falling off the pace in the 2013/14 season, and shamefully giving Steven Gerrard a chance of a Premier League title, they redoubled their efforts. Diego Costa and Cesc Fabregas took them to an early lead in the hunt for the league, and they were never seriously troubled in pursuit of it from that point. They did, though, clearly suffer from a lack of rotation, and fatigue, as Jose Mourinho failed to give extensive time to squad players or youngsters that Chelsea had planned to bring through.

It seemed like Chelsea were strengthening from a position of strength in the summer. They had easily won the league, and the addition of Radamel Falcao, Papy Djilobodji, Pedro, Baba Rahman and Asmir Begovic wasn’t spectacular, but seemed like it would take the edge off the strain of the coming season. It became clear early into the season that the most pressing strain was not a physical one.

Eden Hazard started sullenly and devoid of inspiration. John Terry had lost his focus. Diego Costa hadn’t lost anything, but instead gained some podge and some profligacy. Cesc Fabregas and Nemanja Matic seemed unable to think. Against Spurs, Fabregas momentarily appeared to be so on edge that he got football’s first case of the yips.

The reason, it seems, is that they had grown tired of Mourinho’s antics. The floor fell out of the season once Eva Carneiro was abused and then removed from on-pitch action. It was the height of a series of rows and and manufactured controversy directly related to Mourinho. Diego Torres talked in his book on Mourinho’s time at Real about how the players became sick of his histrionics, and obviously clamoured for Carlo Ancelotti’s more relaxed approach. You can compared Mourinho’s record of success to Ancelotti, and see Mourinho brings more trophies, but he is clearly a man with an earlier expiration date. So it seems to have happened at Chelsea, where they neither enjoyed his management, and some were rumoured to be set on seeing him lose at their own expense.

Manchester United are at the stage now where the players have checked out. Louis van Gaal is in the half-light, waiting for the day to finally end, and for him to be kicked out of the club. There are rumours he will be offered a way out, to become technical director of the Netherlands national team. What is clear is that he is not yet at the point where he feels he must resign, despite acknowledging he has lost hope.

He has made comments saying he does not have a clue about how to turn things around, and that he knows the players are no longer interested in him. What this year has shown is that it didn’t have to be this way, and that there was an alternative path to take, but Van Gaal is a man too conservative to make even the obvious changes to improve his side.

At the start of 2015, United had eschewed the chance to add to a team that was lacking in imagination. They had a squad top-heavy with aged attacking players, but needed more central midfielders and strength in defence. They also needed pace on the wings. Instead, Wayne Rooney was used in the middle, Juan Mata was told to do his thing on the right, and Ander Herrera was barely trusted despite making a positive impact in most appearances. They were fortunate when Spurs, Liverpool and Manchester City allowed them huge swathes of space to attack them, setting them up for fourth place, but then struggled whenever sides sat back.

So in the summer, it was clear what the side needed. Ed Woodward was desperate for a superstar, and failed to deliver one, and failed publicly to buy Pedro, a player Barcelona wanted to sell to him and a player who wanted to join them. The central midfield problem was addressed with Bastian Schweinsteiger and Morgan Schneiderlin. Anthony Martial and Memphis offered great potential, and there was a new right-back to replace the staid Antonio Valencia.

But there was no central defender, as Van Gaal and Woodward engineered a situation where Daley Blind was considered first-choice. There was no replacement for Rooney, and he then started his worst season ever, despite the willingness of pundits to praise him for the occasional minute he could control the ball. This season he has two league goals, and United’s scoring record seems further away than ever.

However, Van Gaal has had an even worse time than Rooney. Rather than use Schneiderlin, Herrera and Schweinsteiger regularly as a trio, he has moved to a 4-2-3-1 that puts all the responsilbity on Rooney to be the focus. This he cannot do, as he is now terrible. Marouane Fellaini is still being used despite being unable to pass or finish. Schneiderlin and Herrera are given little trust despite their energy and competence. The defence has no leader and regularly cedes goals despite the continued possession they enjoy. The players have lost hope in their manager, as they leak stories of disquiet and dissent, and it shows every week. All this was avoidable with sensible planning and a sensible attitude to risk. United finish 2015 as they start it. With a manager who needs to change to improve, but won’t and can’t, and with a chief executive who can’t afford to pull the trigger and take some blame himself.

Another manager who could have taken some responsibility over the last decade, and resigned, is Arsene Wenger. His 10 years of repetitive failure, of injuries and of mental weakness, are inexcusable and the new stadium provides only some mitigation.

Nevertheless, unlike Jose Mourinho, and probably unlike Louis van Gaal, Wenger has enjoyed the good fortune to get away with it. Stability, more through luck than judgement, has been rewarded as Arsenal have finally become the most likely winners of the Premier League this season.

Arsenal aren’t actually much better than last season, when they were emphatically not good enough to win the league. They still suffer from countless muscle and ligament injuries that threaten to keep out players between two weeks and two years, as Danny Welbeck and Jack Wilshere can attest, but there are improvements. Mesut Ozil has grown into an exceptional and consistent player, and Olivier Giroud has marginally improved his game, and still has the talent to finish much of the work done by Ozil and Alexis Sanchez.

They go into the end of the year in first place, and there are rumours that a couple of players, Andy Najar and Mohamed Elneny, will be added to their squad. This may be the case of Wenger doing the correct thing at the correct time for the first time in a decade. 2015 might be time Arsenal fans’ blind hope is finally more informed, but it’s hard to guarantee such a thing. Manchester City are still there, as they were at the start of the year, not quite sure whether they can be bothered to play for Manuel Pellegrini with the same verve and determination they will for Pep Guardiola.

The greatest transformation, though, is clearly Leicester City. They started the year managed by a man who acted like a police officer, and who thought nothing of strangling a player on the sidelines. He bullied the press with aggressive-aggressive behaviour. It seemed like Nigel Pearson would be the manager to take them to the Premier League, only to take them straight back down again.

However, as unpleasant as he often seemed, he nevertheless inspired a remarkable recovery from the relegation zones to Premier League survival with a brilliant run of form. Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy laid the groundwork for their 2015/16 during this period. In the summer, Pearson’s position was made untenable by a combination of his personality and his son’s racist behaviour when on a club tour. Claudio Ranieri, and some foolish people - cough - predicted that this year would be another struggle. Some foolish people - cough cough - even anticipated they would finish in 20th.

As the season began, it was revealed that while Pearson’s son’s racist behaviour deserved a sacking, things like principles didn’t apply when Jamie Vardy did much the same thing to a Japanese man in a casino. As is tradition in football, he repaid the club’s support, despite racism, with goals. Luis Suarez and John Terry showed that this is apparently a valid way to answer your critics, and so Vardy broke the Premier League’s consecutive scoring record, as he, N’Golo Kante, Mahrez and the rest of the side annihilated opponents who could only rarely outscore them. The superhuman fitness and lack of injuries has been teamed with Ranieri’s benign man-management.

While the sudden, almost inexplicable rise of Leicester caught most of the attention, Spurs also deserve praise. At the start of 2015, there was more than a little anticipation of what Mauricio Pochettino’s Spurs were eventually going to be like. There was sometimes a brittleness to the squad and the team, and they had to be thankful for Harry Kane’s emergence. A confident player whose accuracy with head and foot took teams and ‘keepers by surprise, and they had a swagger not seen for years. With the summer, they simply continued the work, pruning the squad and improving it sensibly. Unlike Leicester, they did not burst into life, and it seemed as if Kane might suffer in his second full season in the first-team, and lost their opening match to Manchester United.

It took several weeks for them to find themselves again, but once they did, they managed to become a side tough to beat, and Kane and Erik Lamela made up for Christian Eriksen’s worrying lack of impact, with goals and assists. The question for Spurs in 2016, as it often is, is how they can keep hold of their best players as richer clubs circle. In what is a rarer development, that now applies to the manager, too.