Football
Iain Macintosh, ESPN.com writer 7y

Chelsea, Spurs fly high; Klopp ousts Arsenal, United; Allardyce redemption

And just like that, the 2016-17 Premier League came to an end. It has been a campaign of highs and lows, as Iain Macintosh points out.

Heroes

Eighteen months ago, Chelsea were sliding toward the relegation zone, with Jose Mourinho apparently as welcome in the dressing room as an outbreak of trench foot. After five months of drift under Guus Hiddink, Antonio Conte was charged with fixing them. And it has to be said, he has done a pretty decent job. That dressing room has bitten many a manager in the past, but Conte tamed, harnessed and rode it to victory. Chelsea are deserving champions, and the Italian should be manager of the year.

Tottenham shouldn't be too disheartened by missing out. Eighty-six points would be enough to win the title in most seasons, and this was their second consecutive challenge. The strides they have taken under Mauricio Pochettino have been of gargantuan proportions; the challenge now is to keep this team together over the summer and buy a box of hypnotherapy tapes to convince its players that there is nothing weird about Wembley. It's just another football pitch, not a haunted castle.

It could have been so different. If referee Martin Atkinson had given a penalty, as he surely should have done, for Dejan Lovren's push on Patrick Bamford, Liverpool could Europa League-bound. The line between success and failure can be thin, but Liverpool landed on the right side of it on Sunday. Jurgen Klopp, in his first full season with the club, has topped Arsenal and Manchester United to secure Champions League football. That's progress and must be considered a successful season.

Somewhere in the drama at the top and the bottom of the table, the magnitude of Burnley's achievement has been lost. This is a relatively small club with limited resources in a crowded catchment area, and Sean Dyche has kept them up with points to spare. Under his nearly five years in charge, Burnley haven't just improved on the pitch, they've used TV revenues wisely to transform themselves off it. A new contract would probably be in order, because it won't be long before a larger club targets Dyche.

This has been quite a season for Sam Allardyce. The joy of landing the England job. The pain of losing the England job. The grim realisation that for all the big talk and big plans and hopes and dreams, he is forever destined to trudge from one troubled, medium-sized club to another, putting out fires, rebuilding the squad and moving on with jeers ringing in his ears when the fans have had their fill of prosaic, effective football. But hey, everyone needs a niche! Mission accomplished.

Villains

Like the party guest who departs after knocking the TV over, dropping a drink on the cat and being sick in a plant pot, no one is too upset that Sunderland have gone down. A heady cocktail of bad planning, bad management, bad players, bad attitudes and bad football has delivered the relegation that, in truth, most of us expected to have happened years ago. Their long suffering supporters deserve better than this, but unless something dramatic changes, it's hard to see a swift promotion back to the top flight.

It's even harder to imagine Hull City coming back. Marco Silva's shrewd management gave them a chance of survival that they didn't really deserve, but their season ended before it started when the club's owners chose to wait for a takeover rather than prepare the team for the Premier League. Steve Bruce saw it coming and walked away, but fans don't get that option. It can only be hoped that new owners finally materialise. If not, you can easily imagine Hull dropping another division.

We're all supposed to have moved on now, but have we? Have we really? Can we ever move on from the sacking of Claudio Ranieri? Last season, it was all morale-boosting pizzas with the lads and dilly-ding-dilly-dong. This season brought a dramatic nosedive and the threat of relegation. Throughout, Leicester's players insisted that there was no problem between them and Ranieri. After he left, said players won six straight games. That wasn't a good look.

Some of the abuse has been over the top and some of the reactions hysterical, but there's no doubting the fact that Arsenal have underperformed. The blame has to be shared: Some of it is Arsene Wenger's fault, certainly, but too few players have consistently shown their ability or they have compromised it with bad decisions. And thank you, Laurent Koscielny, for demonstrating that in such style on the final day. There is still an FA Cup to play for, offering Wenger either a dignified exit or a mandate for one more year.

Most trends are fleeting. so let us hope that when 2017-18 begins, there'll be no more banners on aeroplanes. Wenger might well be past his best, but he deserved better than to have his own supporters protest from the sky. And it didn't make it any better that a pro-Wenger banner followed it. If you want to sound off about the football, just get a Twitter account. There are so many better ways than this to spend thousands of pounds.

^ Back to Top ^