JOINING THE TOP FLIGHT NEED HOLD NO FEAR
WE USED to talk about the great leap in quality from the Championship to the Premier League. Now it is only the feckless or the flawed who need to worry.
If you want to come up from the second tier and threaten the upper echelons of the top division then, sure, you will need to spend some money well. Or have a manager like sheffield united’s Chris Wilder.
But if I were a supporter of Leeds or West Brom — currently occupying the top two places in the Championship — would I look at the clutch of clubs in and around the bottom six places of the Premier League and worry for what could happen next season? Not for a minute.
One thing the current obligation to play football in empty stadia has revealed is just how poor the teams at the bottom end of the table really are. Without supporters to motivate them and make life uncomfortable for the opposition, their naked dreadfulness has been revealed.
Norwich, Bournemouth and Aston Villa – despite two positive results yesterday – have been awful since restart and would appear to deserve what is coming. Watford, Wes t Ham and Brighton have not been as bad as that but remain riddled with inadequacies.
There have been three notable results from the lot of them — Brighton’s defeat of Arsenal, West Ham’s victory over Chelsea and now Bournemouth’s surprise disposal of Leicester.
Brighton and West Ham have also beaten Norwich and that will probably be enough to save them. Watford have also beaten Norwich. But then everyone beats Norwich, and Villa and Bournemouth must curse the fact they are not due to play a team that seemed to be heading for relegation since day one of the season. Yes, Norwich will head back to the Championship after one year without leaving so much as a footprint behind in the sand. They are the club who gambled on winning promotion and surviving without making a significant signing. They were wrong.
Villa, meanwhile, are the ones who came up and thought the opposite tactic would work.
They would have been right, had they not spent some of their money so badly.
And that leaves sheffield united. Well managed and well coached by Wilder, they haven’t spent fortunes but they invested £20million in striker Oli McBurnie. The 24-year- old has not been prolific but he has played in 33 of his team’s 35 league games and scored in recent wins over Chelsea and Tottenham. so he must have been doing something right.
To a degree, this is the point. This is actually all that it takes in the Premier League to get by: decent players and good coaching.
Rafa Benitez brought Newcastle up three years ago. The club spent only modestly but Benitez kept them up. At Wolves two summers ago, Nuno Espirito santo was allowed to recruit more ambitiously and that paid off, too. They finished seventh and should better that this time.
so there is no glass ceiling between our top two divisions beyond the one that would appear to exist in people’s minds.
If it is to be Leeds and West Brom who win promotion they already have the first building blocks in place — their managers. Marcelo Bielsa is more tactically astute than many of those whose company he will join while slaven Bilic managed West Ham to 7th and 11th-place finishes in the Premier League before losing his way. That can happen. The lower reaches of the Premier League will not and should not be the limit of two big clubs’ ambition next season.
Norwich arrived and looked lost from the very outset. Villa spent some of their money on the wrong players. As we said at the top of this column: feckless and flawed.