Chelsea dominate to leave Manchester giants in shade
The 2016-17 season will be remembered for Conte’s men marching to the title, farewells to White Hart Lane and John Terry, Arsenal falling short and three at the back returning to fashion, writes Paul Hayward
This was the season when the team who finished 10th last year won the Premier League, and the champions of 12 months ago finished 12th this time round. The Leicester uprising was crushed as Arsenal fell short of Champions League football for the first time in 20 years.
This time last year we were eulogising Leicester’s impossible triumph. In May 2016 they reached 38 games with 81 points. This time they have 44.
Chelsea limped home with 50 but now have 93, along with a ‘golden glove’ for goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois and all three individual player awards for N’golo Kanté, who was Leicester’s pivot before he moved to Stamford Bridge for £11million less than ‘super agent’ Mino Raiola took for shifting Paul Pogba to Manchester United.
The final day of the 2016-17 campaign had all the tension of a country show, except in the ‘battle for fourth’, which was won by Liverpool with a 3-0 win over Middlesbrough, who scored 27 times all season, and were therefore unlikely to be much help to Arsenal, who beat Everton with 10 men but still tumbled into the Europa League, where every night is Thursday night, and the planes tend not to touch down in Madrid, Munich and Barcelona.
An odd final Sunday saw the ball deliberately kicked out so John Terry could be taken off after 26 minutes, and a youth team fielded by Manchester United, whose Angel Gomes, 16, became the first 21st-century footballer to see Premier League action.
Meanwhile, Walter Mazzarri took charge of Watford, despite having being sacked already, and Southampton’s Claude Puel was jeered by his own supporters, despite finishing eighth – one place above Bournemouth, arguably the season’s biggest over-achievers.
At the top, Chelsea and Spurs redeemed a title race that failed to deliver a six-way contest, and left the two Manchester giants in their shadow, after a summer of hype suggesting this would be the Jose Mourinho v Pep Guardiola show. That Mancunian struggle is likely to be more intense next year, but Chelsea will take some stopping with the super-shrewd Antonio Conte in charge.
Despite the office party feel to their 5-1 victory over Sunderland, and the emotion around Terry, the champions became the first Premier League side to win 30 times in a 38-game programme.
“If you want to have a good season, you must always have this fire in your soul, in your heart, in your head,” Conte said on Friday, already challenging his players to hold what they have.
They won the title by seven points in the end, which hardly does justice to Spurs, who went out with 6-1 and 7-1 wins inside four days, with Harry Kane scoring four and three respectively to run away with the golden boot, on 29 (Romelu Lukaku was next, with 25). With that four-day rampage, Spurs managed to go past Chelsea as the highest scoring team of 2016-17 (86 goals to 85), while also conceding the fewest (26).
Best attack, best defence. Not a bad record for Tottenham to take to Wembley next season while White Hart Lane is turned to dust. Not to load pressure on him, but Kane is on his way to Alan Shearer
or Gary Lineker territory, while Dele Alli is now the league’s most prolific midfielder.
Alli’s 18 goals place him in the Frank Lampard class, though he needs to repeat those figures for many years to match Lampard, Steven Gerrard or Paul Scholes.
These Anglocentric judgments obscure a bleaker picture beyond these shores. Juventus, the club where Conte won three consecutive Serie A titles, proceed to a Champions League final against Real Madrid – a heavyweight bout in Cardiff. Leicester were the best of England’s Champions League contenders this season, departing at the quarter-final stage. To field only one side (and an outsider at that) in the last eight of European football’s defining competition was mortifying for a league where Manchester United have just become the first club to reach £1billion in prize-money.
As judgment day dawned, six points separated nine teams between eighth and 16th places: fresh evidence of the strength of the league’s middle-class, the counterpoint to which is a growing tendency to reach mid-table safety and then switch off.
Each position is worth £1.9million in merit payments, so club owners are within their rights to rail against teams thinking the season ends when 40 points are on the board.
Mourinho’s political games stretched all the way to last-day debut’s for Joel Pereira, Josh Harrop, Scott Mctominay and Demetri Mitchell. And despite adding Pogba and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Mourinho could add only three points to the 66 won last year. The United manager’s early white flag in the race for fourth place exerts intense pressure on his team in Wednesday night’s Europa League final against Ajax in Stockholm.
Tactical flexibility was one of the season’s most interesting spectacles as three-at-the-back completed its return from fashion’s tundra. When Chelsea lost 3-0 at Arsenal in September, Conte spoke again and again of looking for “solutions”. It sounded like a managerial platitude and nobody took much notice. But the “solution” was a three-man defence in which César Azpilicueta led the whole Premier League passing table with 2,455.
Conte’s game management was superb. Three of the four most subbed-off players in the league were withdrawn by Chelsea’s manager: Eden Hazard, Pedro and Victor Moses. As Richard Scudamore, the league’s chief executive, said yesterday morning, Conte laid on “a coaching masterclass”. Across the 20 teams meanwhile, Manchester City were true to Guardiola’s manifesto, with 27,704 passes. West Brom were bottom, with 11,822.
In the annual relegation saga Swansea managed to employ three managers yet still survive, with Paul Clement much the best of them after Francesco Guidolin and Bob Bradley had been ejected. At the same time the north-eastern side of England lost three clubs to the Championship, with only Newcastle’s promotion to balance the ledger.
Along the south coast, Southampton and Bournemouth both top 10 clubs, are now joined by Brighton and Hove Albion, back in the top flight, for the first time in 34 years.
As Liverpool returned to the Champions League, Wenger spoke darkly of “horrendous” conditions for his players, and a “lack of clarity” about his future, to which he, it must be said, contributed. An FA Cup final appearance against Chelsea drained the fall into the Europa League of rancour, though there was chanting against Stan Kroenke, the majority owner. Wenger was unsure whether Kroenke was even there for the 3-1 win over Everton, which tells its own troubling tale.
In London (not that football is a regional contest), Arsenal are now subservient to Chelsea and Spurs, and can hardly ignore the need for structural change. But for next season’s title race to enthral, Manchester must contribute. City and United need to be more than a load of hoopla around two charismatic managers.
The final day had all the tension of a country show except in the battle for fourth place Chelsea became the first Premier League side to win 30 times in a 38 game season