16 Conclusions from the Premier League final day: Spurs survive, West Ham down, Euro fighters | OneFootball

No doubt where the main focus of the final day was, but the squabble over the final relegation place never really came to life with Spurs taking care of business in uncharacteristic fashion that at times veered dangerously close to competence.

Their curiously bloodless 1-0 win over Everton left West Ham’s thumping of Leeds moot, but away from the relegation fight there was a spectacular game of mid-table musical chairs that resulted in a very pleasing collection of qualifiers for the Thursday night European competitions next season.

And, of course, some significant farewells. It’s going to be a very different Premier League next season.

1. And so Spurs survive. Not quite by the skin of their teeth but damn close to it. Hard to know how to describe the emotions in the ground afterwards but it was more an outpouring of relief rather than joy.

Spurs fans can and will celebrate their team clearing this lowest of bars, but those in charge should still be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

This has been a wretched, careless, hubristic and error-strewn season when one different result for themselves or West Ham would have seen it end in utter catastrophe.

The attention must now swiftly turn to what happens next at a club who have now finished 17th in successive Premier League seasons with 79 points from their last 76 games.

‘Never again’ will be the cry but that was already the case at the end of last season, when Ange Postecoglou paid with his job because delivering the miracle of actual for-real silverware wasn’t enough when combined with finishing above only the relegated trio.

When the Sky Sports cameras panned to CEO Vinai Venkatesham and sporting director Johan Lange grinning in injury time, you’d forgive Spurs fans if they started throwing things at their televisions despite the day going their way.

The idea of that pair getting away with their abysmal efforts this season is the fly in the Spurs ointment. Both should still be swiftly removed and replaced if Spurs are to have meaningful hope of something significantly better than this next time around.

2. The example of Manchester United will be used as evidence that Spurs can change their stars in a single summer, but the chance of Spurs doing anything like the equivalent of last summer’s Manchester United transfer business feels like it’s for the birds.

You can already almost picture a smug Johan Lange reflecting on the summer transfer window and insisting that the lack of new arrivals is absolutely fine because the Like A New Signing energy is off the charts with a fully fit James Maddison, Mohammad Kudus and who knows maybe even Dejan Kulusevski available again a mere 15 months after he suffered a ‘knock’ in defeat to Crystal Palace.

3. But what Spurs do at least now have in place is a manager who can deliver if this silliest of football clubs will just give him the chance.

What Roberto De Zerbi has achieved here since the defeat at Sunderland is little short of extraordinary. In that first game he lost Cristian Romero to a season-ending injury. Kudus never reappeared after a setback in his recovery. Two players De Zerbi specifically pinpointed as crucial when he took over. Then Xavi Simons did a cruciate to leave Spurs almost entirely bereft of attacking craft.

De Zerbi inherited a squad whose confidence was on the floor, who hadn’t won a league game in months and months and who, already missing a whole bunch of key players, would continue to lose more and key players. To collect 11 points from the last six games of the season under those conditions was a remarkable feat of management. He deserves great praise and to have every single one of whatever wild promises a desperate club made in order to convince him to come in before the summer honoured.

De Zerbi made those wishes plainly known in his post-match press conference.

We won’t hold our breath.

4. The most extraordinary thing about Spurs’ final-day survival was how… we were going to say serene but that’s too much, but how largely stress-free it was.

Spurs were always likely to stay up today, of course, but it was also felt inevitable that it would be deeply unpleasant.

Instead, they started and ended the day with a two-goal cushion – with it needing both an Everton goal and a West Ham goal at that point – and ended the day with a two-goal cushion (this time two Everton goals) having never once seen that reduce to the potential panic-inducing one-goal jeopardy.

Spurs played really quite well against an admittedly wretched and half-arsed Everton side who only really began to even try and test Spurs’ nerves in the closing minutes.

5. Spurs started the game brilliantly, and didn’t even panic when the early nerve-settler they clearly craved didn’t arrive. They were dominant throughout the first half and fully deserved the lead handed to them by Joao Palhinha, a man whose five Premier League goals really were difference-makers of huge import this season.

He scored in the 2-0 win at Man City back in August that now feels like it was about three centuries ago. He scored an injury-time equaliser against Wolves and the late winner against the same opposition earlier this month just as Spurs looked like they were going to slip four points behind West Ham and almost beyond salvation.

And then today’s scruffy, second-attempt goal, the most beautiful ugly goal Spurs have scored in a stadium that has brought them almost nothing but pain this season.

It’s an extraordinary home record, in the end. A home win on the opening day of the season. A home win on the final day of the season. And in between, just a single, solitary success almost slap bang in the middle in December.

Even with this closing win – a victory that absurdly means De Zerbi in three games has been responsible for precisely one-third of all Spurs’ home points this season – they remain 18th in the home table, five points adrift of the next worst and with the same number of wins as Wolves.

It’s not hard to see where the most obvious improvement must come next season.

6. It’s also easy to see where the most obvious improvement has already come. Spurs haven’t yet been a particularly convincing De Zerbi-style attacking team, which is no great surprise. De Zerbi has had neither the time nor raw materials available to make it happen.

There have been glimpses and flashes of something good, something certainly better than what went before, but their attack has remained a clear point of weakness.

What De Zerbi has done is make Spurs a much better team on the ball and by extension far better defensively.

Actual good players Micky van de Ven and Pedro Porro have once again looked like actual good players having been largely cack all season.

But a Spurs team that had conceded at least one xGA in every game since the first week of January finished the season with five games out of six under that benchmark. Only against Leeds did they give up more than 1 xGA, and most of that was the penalty. Today, Everton’s xG was 0.19. Spurs were and are far from perfect, but for once in their life they managed not to be even slightly Spursy on a day that had the potential for Spursiness absolutely all over it.

We suppose the collection of Arsenal fans, frauds and nepo babies running the show at Spurs do deserve the tiniest shred of credit for eventually pulling out all the stops to get a proper manager in. Sure, they could have saved everyone a lot of stress and upset by making that move much earlier when it was very obviously necessary, but still.

A similarly tiny quantity of grudging kudos for not in the end loaning Antonin Kinsky to West Ham in January.

Spurs would be a Championship club now if they’d taken the stupid route on either occasion, and this is a club that simply adores stupid routes.

7. West Ham can at least take some tiny consolation in the fact they did their bit on the final day in some style, streaking clear of Leeds in the second half after a tight opening 45 minutes to win 3-0 and at least attempt to put Spurs under some kind of pressure.

But they were always reliant on Everton doing the same, and the Toffees just never really did.

The Hammers can in one way consider themselves unfortunate for racking up 39 points and it not being enough. It’s half as much again as would have been required for safety in either of the last two seasons, and a total that hasn’t cost a team their Premier League place in 15 years. Only three teams have ever gone down with more than 39 points, and one of those was already West Ham.

Yet they have messed this season up in the grand manner and cannot really complain. Across the season they were the third-worst team in the division, and for large parts of it the outright worst.

8. It’s always going to be tough when you know just one different result changes everything, and West Ham fans will all have plenty of games they can point to for their evidence.

But there were two key periods of this season where they let themselves down. First, and most obviously, in that 10-game winless run around the new year.

The real frustration there is that it came right after Nuno Espirito Santo appeared to have landed on something. Seven points from three games against Newcastle, Burnley and Bournemouth looked like a turning point. But that was followed by a desperately meek non-performance in defeat to Liverpool that set West Ham down a dark path for months.

The other, of course, was the three-match losing run this month. Having reeled Spurs in and get matters into their own hands, the last-minute winner against Everton felt like a huge moment but instead became the end of the journey. West Ham had put so much into getting out of the bottom three they had nothing left to keep themselves out of it when faced with a newly-competent Spurs at last picking up points of their own.

9. Whoever went today, we already knew we were going to be left with an alphabetically lopsided Premier League table next season, and even more so now. For the first time, the English top-flight now contains no team beginning with a W. With nary a Wolves or a West Ham or a West Brom in sight, Tottenham’s reward for their escape is to immediately go bottom of the newly formed 26/27 table.

But with Sunderland also the league’s only S thanks to the ongoing absence of your Southamptons, Stokes and the Swanseas of this world, next season will also start with Nottingham Forest in the bottom three and that’s just plain nutty.

10. It’s not all bad news for Sunderland, though. Some might even argue that qualifying for the Europa League outweighs their lowly standing in the irrelevant pre-season table. What a season it has been for Regis Le Bris and the lads.

There has been a sense for most of the season that anyone between seventh and 14th could wind up pretty much anywhere, but from a neutral standpoint we’ve been left with an enormously satisfying final table when the music stopped.

Sunderland’s win over Chelsea – for whom there must be a degree of grudging respect for the fact they have turned up for precisely one Premier League game in the last two months and that was to try and relegate Spurs because that’s elite hating – saw them the big final-day movers, leaping through the mid-table pack from tenth to seventh and with it European football.

They will be joined in the Europa League by Bournemouth, while for Brighton there’s a Conference League spot despite slumping to a heavy final-day defeat against Manchester United.

Crystal Palace may yet get their belated Europa League spot too if they can win this week’s Conference final. It’s a sensational collection of Thursday night warriors, and the evidence of the last couple of years tells you that all of them have a spectacular chance for some of the very greatest moments in their histories in those competitions.

11. The flipside also makes next season even more interesting. The identity of the teams who are in Europe inevitably leads to some extremely high-profile absences. A mischievous person could make the case that Chelsea have actively thrown the chance of qualifying for a lesser European competition once the Champions League was out of reach, if one were so inclined.

A less mischievous person would note that Chelsea have played 121 games of competitive football in the last 21 months, with not one single blank month among them, and that this is surely at least worth some consideration when looking at their miserable end to this season.

Newcastle and even, heaven help us all, Spurs could also potentially benefit from the reduced playing schedule next season. There is already a pattern for Newcastle under Eddie Howe of alternating seasons where Europe is secured with seasons where that workload causes them to stumble domestically.

The one-game-a-week schedule has surely also played a significant part in Man United’s significant improvement under Michael Carrick in the second half of this season.

It will be a huge factor next season.

12. Some finish to the season, too, for Aston Villa, who wrapped up fourth place by coming from behind to beat a deflated and defeated Man City. In the space of nine days, Villa have outclassed Liverpool, ended a 30-year trophy drought, and humbled Man City.

It remains one of the season’s most ludicrous mysteries as to quite why Unai Emery’s name was absent from the manager of the year shortlist.

What Villa have done this season – and, it’s worth remembering – from a troubled and deeply unconvincing start – is sensational.

Winning the Europa League was always a rock-solid target this season but managing to combine that success with sustained excellence in the league makes it all the more impressive. They have done what neither Tottenham nor Man United could do last season and combine a deep European run with maintained league form.

West Ham fans might still be upset about that much-changed team against Spurs, but we’re pretty sure Villa aren’t particularly upset by how they finished the season after that game. It’s almost like they got it absolutely spot on, in a way.

13. We’ve very much enjoyed the Premier League scriptwriters deciding that the closing weeks of a season that had narrative out the wazoo also had just enough space for a discourse about whether assists are even a thing. It really is the best league in the world.

The reason we all suddenly had to have an opinion on this was because Bruno Fernandes had equalled and now on the final day bettered the all-time Premier League record.

Twenty-one assists in a team that conspicuously lacks a truly elite goalscorer – they had no player in the top 10 goalscorers for the season, their joint leading scorers each managing as many goals as Richarlison and Zian Flemming – is a remarkable effort and we’re not really sure acknowledging this should be seen as in any way a controversial or daft thing to note.

14. Talking of assists brings us neatly to the assorted farewells, starting with Mo Salah. Red-faced talk of not involving him on the final day turned out to nobody’s real surprise to be a load of bumwash, with Salah starting the game and being serenaded by Liverpool fans at its end.

It’s a real shame that it’s all been somewhat tainted over the last weeks of his Liverpool career, but as more time passes that disappointing finish will fade into the background and the enormity of his achievements will take over. He’s won it all with Liverpool and ends with an astonishing 193 goals (fourth all-time) and 94 assists (sixth all-time) in 328 Premier League games.

An undisputed great, as is the now ex-Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola. We desperately hope Andoni Iraola is at least staying in the Premier League even if we know it won’t be with Bournemouth, while Oliver Glasner has one last hurrah on the agenda with Palace this week.

15. A wonderfully pointless game of football between Crystal Palace and Arsenal saw one team fully focused on a game three days now up against a team fully focused on a game six days from now having also not slept since Tuesday.

Arsenal won it, nobody much cared, and then came the main business of the day: a trophy lift as a reward for all those who sat through what had become the most low-key game of the season.

The undoubted highlight? David Raya opening a whole new front in Full Kit W*nkery by bringing his gloves to put on for the celebration despite not being in the matchday squad. Huge, huge fan of it. We have but one note: they should have been golden.