The horse carrying Chelsea’s colors having run off with this season’s Premier League title in England, it was left to Arsenal and the Manchester clubs to joust on Sunday for the minor placings.
These, though, are not trifling, because second, third and fourth in this league opens up the riches of Champions League participation, and with it close to $100 million a club.
It was instructive the way that Manchester City, the deposed champion, has responded to all manner of speculation about whether its manager, Manuel Pellegrini, keeps his job, and which players have earned another shot at one of the highest-paying clubs. Pellegrini knows only one way to play this game, by going forward and trusting his players to outscore the opponents.
A week ago, City ruthlessly crushed Queens Park Rangers, 6-1. Sunday, on the home turf of a much tougher side, Swansea City, Manchester’s light blues were again on the front foot, and again full of goals.
Yaya Touré, the big Ivorian around whom there is so much speculation that he could be sold if City finds a buyer to match his salary, was given the captain’s arm band by Pellegrini. Touré scored twice (and his countryman Wilfied Bony also scored) in an entertaining contest which Manchester won, 4-2.
The team lived dangerously, Swansea hit back to tie the score at 2-2, but eventually Pellegrini’s philosophy that he has the ammunition to entertain by outscoring any other team paid off.
City is thus virtually home and dry as the runner-up. Its 76 points is still eight points off Chelsea, but it stands five points, and a whole lot better in goal difference, over Arsenal on 71 points and Manchester United on 69.
Arsenal does have two games, both at home, to play while its main opponents for the runner-up spot have one remaining match. The significance of these is that second and third receive automatic passage to the group phase of the Champions League, but the team that finishes fourth has to come back off its vacation early and to play home and away extra games to qualify for that phase, and for all that money.
The fact that Manchester United met Arsenal on Sunday was therefore key to this race to the post that Chelsea passed long ago. Strangely, then, United and Arsenal provided a tentative, passive 95 minutes at Old Trafford stadium.
It ended all square, 1-1. The onus was on Man United, as the home side, to set the tempo and that, for an hour, was the way it panned out. Marouane Fellaini, the tall, angular Belgian who can appear so awkward on the eye, has actually graduated into a pivotal player for United.
His energy, and his willingness to show for the ball, makes him easy to find by team mates, and it was Fellaini, operating just behind the main striker, who set up the attack from which United scored after half an hour.
He swept the ball out to the left where Ashley Young, another vastly improved United man this season, made swift ground before crossing toward the far post. Two men in red, the ubiquitous Fellaini and the reborn ex-Chelsea player Juan Mata, drew Arsenal defenders away from that cross.
And there, lurking unseen, was Ander Herrera, the neat and tidy midfielder who pounced with the sweetest of volleys, using the inside of his right foot to score from eight yards.
The response was a long time coming. You could have rocked a baby to sleep at times, so passive was Arsenal and so quiet was the stadium. For 60 minutes, Arsenal, arguably the most attack-minded side in England, failed to register a shot of any kind.
Slowly, the encounter changed character. United had given a rare start to the Colombian Radamel Falcao in preference to Robin van Persie, but poor Falcao, once so prolific for Atlético Madrid and Monaco, has been a shadow of himself ever since he tore anterior cruciate knee ligaments in January 2014.
His plight was reflected in print last week when his mother, Carmenza Zarate, reportedly told Colombia’s El Espectador: “I often tell my son that if God shows him a new path, he will leave Manchester. If not, he will stay. God hasn’t abandoned him, and he will become again what he has been, a great scorer.”
But not, perhaps, in Manchester. He was withdrawn before the end, and gave a sad, seemingly final wave to the fans in a place where he has not scored in his last 13 appearances.
Falcao is only on loan, and few expect Manchester to extend that contract. By contrast, goalkeeper David de Gea, United’s outstanding performer this past 12 months, could be leaving of his own volition. Manchester wants him to stay, but Real Madrid wants to take him back to his home city where, among other things, his girlfriend resides.
Late in Sunday’s game, which could also be his last at Old Trafford, de Gea was injured and replaced by a former Barcelona keeper, Victor Valdés. It wasn’t to be a happy debut for Valdés.
He was barely on the field for a handful of minutes when a cross by Theo Walcott deflected off the foot of Tyler Blackett, and into the net. That tied the result, 1-1, and the match that over the years had been a rip roaring fight between United and Arsenal petered out into a draw.
Louis van Gaal, the United manager, would confirm nor deny whether Falcao or de Gea will stay. He did say, however, this: “Arsenal have been perhaps the best team this season. But they could not finish a game; we could not finish a game. Chelsea is the team that always could finish a game; that is why it is the champion.”
Van Gaal added that he had told his players in the locker room that they could say they are unlucky because this was the third time in successive games that a deflected goal cost them. “But, I also said, you are not unlucky because you have to force your luck, and force other teams back more than we have done.”
More like Chelsea than the rest.
