Morgan Gibbs-White relegates Tottenham Hotspur unless hungover, depleted Palace beat West Ham | OneFootball

The race for the Champions League and the relegation battle have both become much clearer after an absolutely disastrous weekend for Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur.

We can confidently say the top five is as good as set. It will be Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa and Liverpool – probably in that order.

Yes, it’s a fun part of a pretty mad Premier League season, especially with so many clubs punching above their weight, but the two biggest stories are undoubtedly the title race and Tottenham’s fight against relegation.

It’s quite hard to put into words just how disastrous a weekend it has been for the north Londoners.

For the first time this season, Spurs looked like a team who knew they were in a relegation battle in Saturday’s home match against Brighton and Hove Albion.

They were actually pretty good against the Premier League’s in-form team.

The result, however, was probably their most painful in an excruciating campaign.

An injury-time Brighton equaliser denied Spurs their first win in the Premier League this year, leaving them a point behind 17th-placed West Ham United, who play their game in hand against Crystal Palace on Monday night.

They face an injury-ravaged Palace team on the back of a tough Europa Conference League match against Fiorentina, which was followed by a celebratory night out in Florence.

So they are missing multiple important players and are hungover? Literally nothing is going Spurs’ way.

That game hasn’t even happened yet and Spurs fans have already accepted their fate.

Their one ray of hope was Nottingham Forest’s home game against Burnley on Sunday. We are really, really stretching with the word ‘hope’, by the way.

Forest were the strong favourites on paper but made hard work of what should have been a routine victory. Of course, when you’re in the bottom four at this stage of the season, routine victories are an extreme rarity.

Up 1-0 at half-time, Burnley were exposing themselves as the only Premier League team who want Spurs to stay up. Either form showed or the Clarets realised what they were denying us, because they were put to the sword in the second period.

Because this is Tottenham, it was Morgan Gibbs-White – who was agonisingly close to joining the Londoners last summer – who turned things around with a 15-minute hat-trick.

Two brilliant right-footed finishes followed by a precise header earned Vitor Pereira’s side a 4-1 home victory and a five-point buffer between themselves and Spurs.

It’s a catastrophic weekend for Spurs, made even more depressing by the false hope they were given by Xavi Simons’ belter against Brighton and Zian Flemming’s opener at the City Ground.

At this point, you have to question whether this is a social experiment.

We can safely assume Forest and Leeds United are safe. Because Spurs won’t help themselves, they need Palace to do them a solid against West Ham.

The way this weekend is going for Spurs, that obviously will not happen.

They are down, aren’t they? Bloody hell.