Fair to say there have been Premier League final days with more riding on them than this one, but we still had a fascinating and ultimately wildly controversial scrap for Champions League places and Spurs completing their unimprovable banter season in perfect 10/10 fashion.
1. No doubt about the biggest talking point of the final day. With the European battle the only thing of significance to be decided beyond gauche money-counting and just-above-the-relegation-zone banter, we were left with four games that mattered, and one of them turned decisively on what is sure to end up as one of the worst refereeing f*ck-ups of the campaign.
Ten-man Aston Villa – more on that very shortly – were holding on to a point with something approaching unbecoming desperation against a Manchester United side starting to wonder if they would in fact ever score a goal ever again.
Then it seemed things had got even better for them as Morgan Rogers pounced Altay Bayindir’s howling failure to pick up the most straightforward of loose balls. Rogers duly rolled the ball into the net, only for the referee’s whistle to sound before it crossed the line.
The significance of that was that it left VAR powerless to intervene and correct such an obvious mistake.
Bayindir being preferred to Andre Onana in the wake of Wednesday’s night’s Europa League misery was always likely to become a talking point but few could have imagined it becoming such a decisive moment in how the entire final day panned out.
2. And that’s because even a point looked to be enough for Villa to get themselves back into a tournament they played such a fine part in this season. And were it not for that officiating error they would surely have got it against so bereft a United side.
Yet just minutes after Villa were robbed they neglected to mark Amad Diallo as he headed home United’s first Premier League goal at Old Trafford since Bruno Fernandes gave them the lead on the stroke of half-time against Arsenal in early March.
A late Christian Eriksen penalty wrapped up the points for United, who had been the better side when Aston Villa still had 11 players and had utterly dominated – albeit with a very familiar absence of cutting edge – once the visitors were down to 10.
Villa’s fury at the refereeing blunder that has cost them is righteous, but honest self-reflection will also inevitably lead them to examine their own individual errors and more general lack of verve in such a massive game.
After a quarter-final exit in the Champions League and semi-final exit in the FA Cup, it has been a nearly season for Villa. Not a failure, yet not quite a success. And that’s a feeling exacerbated by the likes of Palace, Newcastle and Spurs shedding the ‘nearly not quite almost’ tags they’ve carried for decades.
3. A word on the biggest individual error. Yet another rare blunder from Emi Martinez, the former Best Goalkeeper In The World who has endured a torrid season.
He saved the worst for last with a ludicrous red card at Old Trafford. While Matty Cash’s underhit backpass did him absolutely no favours the keeper’s response was a complete brainfade.
Even if we stop to ignore the sheer guileless obviousness of the most clear-cut attempt to deny an obvious goalscoring opportunity with not even a hint of regard for the ball, we cannot overlook the fact that this brazen foul and its inevitable outcome was committed on Rasmus Bloody Hojlund in a position where there was still a great deal of work left to turn opportunity into goal.
If ever there were a striker against whom this kind of reckless desperation was unnecessary, it is surely Hojlund. Even had it been the final minute of the second rather than first half it would still all have seemed a bit unnecessary.
And it points to a keeper whose brain is not where it ought to be. At his best Martinez was a keeper who would back himself one-on-one with anybody. Now he suffers total panicked collapse at the sight of Rasmus Hojlund. How far he done fell.
4. With Villa’s combination of self-sabotage and infuriating misfortune handing Manchester United a vaguely positive end to a season of utter misery, Newcastle were able to stumble into the Champions League for the second time in three seasons despite ending their own campaign with a 1-0 home defeat to Everton.
On another day, this was a result that could have left the season with a very different feel for Newcastle. An anti-climactic ending to a campaign of such joy. As it is, a season already secure in its place as one of the most memorable in Newcastle’s history gains another burnishing flourish.
The Carabao victory with its accompanying release of drought-ending emotion feels both an age ago and curiously quaint now, it having been upstaged not once but twice by Crystal Palace and Tottenham pulling off similar tricks in superior competitions, but its significance and impact on Tyneside remains quite rightly undimmed.
And the fact Newcastle were able to combine the catharsis of silverware with a rock-solid league season bodes well for the future.
The next step is to make a more memorable stab at the Champions League than their unfortunate 2023/24 effort.
5. The one team who never appeared in any real final-day danger of missing out on the Champions League was Manchester City, predictably and dare we say boringly taking care of business at Fulham.
They were, entirely obviously, the team who could least afford to miss out; the one for whom such a misstep would represent unfathomable failure.
Theirs was the most straightforward of the final-day tasks and they were the first movers of the final day with a nerve-settling opener after 20 minutes in West London.
It remains, though, a bare minimum achievement at the end of a thoroughly trying and challenging season, one that ended without silverware – for the first time since Pep Guardiola’s first season – and for the first time in years a sense of on-field uncertainty to match the off-field noise that continues to swirl around them.
6. Just before City scored their opening goal – the first of the day of any real significance – TNT Sport saw fit to put up the first ‘As Things Stand’ table of the day showing the current state of play for the teams third through seventh during their coverage of United-Villa.
Surely this breaks all known ‘As Things Stand’ convention and the speed with which City subsequently scored a heavy punishment for their failure to hold their nerve just those few minutes longer.
For the avoidance of any future doubt, an ‘As Things Stand’ might be acceptable on these occasions in the very first seconds of a match as a little reminder of what’s at stake but after that can only be deployed when there has been a material changes to how things stand, accompanied – in accordance with the prophecy – by the commentator declaring ‘Long way to go, of course’.
We trust this will be taken on board for next season.
7. The other game that mattered greedily contained two teams with something to play for in Nottingham Forest and Chelsea. With a kind of grim joy-sapping inevitability it was the seasoned Champions League heads of Chelsea that prevailed over the upstarts who had done so much to make this season memorable but had faltered down the home straight.
Chris Wood has had a stunning, career-best season but will now spend much of his summer thinking about the chance he missed when the game was still goalless. Such is football, such is life.
Chelsea were by the end probably just about value for their win, and probably just about deserved the top-four place it gave them across the season as a whole, one that started and finished impressively but had a massive wobble in the middle.
They remain less than the sum of their parts, but we guess that’s what happens when you spend a billion quid on seemingly random parts.
8. Chelsea themselves provide the obvious silver lining for Nottingham Forest. While there is no denying the transformative potential lost by failing to hold a top-five position for just a little while longer, they also need look no further than today’s opponents to see the positive spin on today’s events.
Forest now find themselves in a European competition that is enormously, tantalisingly winnable. Especially for two-time champions of Europe.
And that positive spin really is needed only for today’s events. The season as a whole remains a triumph. If you told Forest fans back in August they would have something significant to play for on the final day of the season, today’s scenario is not the first that would have sprung to many minds.
9. And the same applies to Aston Villa. That this Tottenham and this Manchester United were able to cut such a swathe through the Europa League should give Villans plenty to get excited about when the anger and frustration of today has died down.
The damage to Villa’s long-term planning from today’s failure to secure back-to-back Champions League seasons is undeniable, especially for a club that has an alarming wage bill. But after a season watching first Newcastle and then Crystal Palace and then Spurs win silverware after long, long waits there has to be at least some small part of every Villa fan’s brain relishing the far greater chance they now have to get themselves a slice of that action.
And we’ll say it again: not one fan among those whose teams secured top-five finishes today looked anything like as deliriously happy about it as Spurs fans did on Wednesday, or Palace fans last Saturday, or Newcastle fans back in March. No reason at all that can’t be Villa a year from now.
10. Everywhere else there was only league position or pride or banter to play for. The day’s biggest party atmosphere was found, of course, at Anfield where a fine time was had by all.
Palace gave Premier League champions Liverpool a guard of honour. Liverpool gave FA Cup winners Crystal Palace a guard of honour.
And Liverpool extended their generosity as hosts to handing Palace an early lead.
We don’t quite share certain pundits’ anger at the way Liverpool have played out the last rites of this season after securing the title with so very long to go.
With the absence of any cup football to keep them sharp, it was inevitable that focus and levels would fall slightly after so emphatically achieving their target and it doesn’t take much of a drop in standards to bring you undone in a Premier League that might not have boasted the same quality of challengers to the title winners as recent years but contained unprecedented depth once the promoted trio had been cut adrift.
Still, though. Not ideal to lose all momentum quite so dramatically in the final few weeks of the season. While they’ve been hugely impressive and worthy Premier League champions this season, we still require some convincing that Liverpool are any more than that. That Slot’s Liverpool might be at the start of an era of huge Premier League success.
A big summer awaits Liverpool with significant incomings and at least one very significant outgoing – one who received a far kinder reception when introduced as a substitute during today’s party atmosphere – and care must be taken not to allow the understandable fashion in which they’ve closed out this season to bleed into the next.
11. One thing that will bleed into next season – and one that will bite Aston Villa on the bum too with Martinez – is Ryan Gravenberch’s three-match ban for a straight red card minutes after he was shuffled in to emergency centre-back deployment as Liverpool chased the game.
Given how little really rode on today’s game, that was perhaps a risk too far from Arne Slot even if the equaliser duly arrived from Who Else But That Man Mo Salah as he firmly rubber-stamped his own long-inevitable individual honours at the end of a spectacular campaign.
12. Liverpool were chasing the game because of an early Palace goal on the back of a Conor Bradley error. Fair to say that however unimportant the game might have been in the wider scheme that of all the Liverpool players to have a final-day moment like that, Bradley is perhaps the worst.
We feel a bit for Bradley. He’s a player of real talent and huge promise but also one upon whom all manner of unfair hopes and expectations and baggage are now being projected.
We get why Liverpool fans would love Trent Alexander-Arnold’s heir to be another homegrown academy graduate. But that is also just statistically an unlikely thing to happen.
Maybe in time Bradley will prove himself worthy, but the talk that he is already some kind of ready-made replacement for the departing TAA is for the birds.
13. So, Spurs. Brilliant – 10/10, no notes. We’d been very clear that we required whoever won the Europa League to finish 17th because that is so much funnier than 15th or 16th could ever hope to be, even though those are also very funny finishing positions for a Champions League qualifier.
We were supremely confident in Spurs’ ability to deliver, and not just because we’d watched the parade on Friday evening and then seen how alarmingly many of those lads were in the starting XI here. Hats off to Brennan Johnson for playing all 96 minutes here after looking extremely tired and emotional by the end of Friday’s festivities. It’s great being young.
No, the main reason we were supremely confident in Spurs is that we’ve also been watching them in the league all season. An early penalty for Dominic Solanke did briefly lift them as high as a profoundly unfunny 14th, but there was no need for alarm.
Even without hangovers, Spurs had already once this season managed to comprehensively spaff away a half-time lead against Brighton and it had a sense of inevitability about it here from the moment a shambolically-defended corner allowed Jack Hinshelwood to equalise.
When another uncleared corner led to a second Hinshelwood and Brighton goal, it was already a question of how many Spurs might concede as hangovers literal and metaphorical really kicked in.
Superbly, the answer was in fact four, the last of which, in the very final minute of the season, was enough to at long last send Spurs’ gravity-defying goal difference into negative numbers for the first time in the entire season. Absolute poetry.
Spurs have completed one of the funniest seasons in history and, while there was never any real scope for today to provide the funniest part of it, they could have done little more to give the season the ending it absolutely deserved.
It’s hard to even imagine how any team could even begin to attempt a season more ludicrous than this one, but we also know if there’s one team that can pull it off, it is Tottenham themselves.
14. After all, just like all TV shows (has anyone actually crunched the numbers on this, as an aside, because it feels like it’s surely a reach?) season three is better than season two.
But as Ange Postecoglou himself pointed out, sometimes TV shows will kill off the main character.
He was absolutely right to let Tottenham’s players enjoy Wednesday’s long-overdue success to its fullest, and his reasons for doing so were spot on: you have to make success like Spurs achieved in Bilbao as memorably enjoyable as you possibly can so that players are happy to, as Ange put it, climb the mountain again next time you ask them.
As such it seems churlish to suggest that today’s frankly inevitable outcome – even the way the game panned out was on brand for both Tottenham and indeed drunk people with its early promise giving way to confusion and regret– might harm Postecoglou’s chances of getting that third season.
It probably has, though. The sheer scale of the eventual defeat means it probably isn’t as shoulder-shrugging;y irrelevant as it may first appear.
Most obviously, it’s just not a one-off. It’s not even the first second-half collapse Spurs have suffered this season against Brighton. If what happened on Wednesday and Friday put some fresh doubts in the minds of Daniel Levy and the Spurs decision-makers, today might just have assuaged them.
And brutal as it is, and as much as we have ourselves come round to the idea that Ange has now earned the right to fail properly here if that’s what he wants, he also can’t really have any complaints.
Even allowing for the reasons Spurs completely sacked off the league campaign and the ultimate vindication of that approach, they were able to sack it off because it had already gone disastrously wrong.
They have now set a record for the most defeats by any non-relegated team in a 38-game Premier League season, and finished the campaign five points closer to a historically bad bottom three than they did the top half.
15. A significant win for Brighton, though, even if events elsewhere took away the last hopes that eighth place might bring with it European football.
Results today falling in such a way that Brighton end up closer to the European qualifiers than any of their fellow mid-table overachievers (your Brentfords, your Bournemouths, the Fulhams of this world) might not mean a great deal but can shift the perception slightly on where they sit in the Premier League’s brave new world where Man United and Spurs can be this catastrophically bad.
16. Arsenal at least managed to avoid repeating Man City’s trick of failing to beat Southampton. But only just, mind, and still find themselves confirmed as one of the Premier League’s worst ever runners-up.
We still think when they buy a striker they win the league – the glibly simplistic take on this season that involves ignoring all manner of things such as Liverpool taking their foot entirely off the gas is that converting even half their draws into wins would have been enough to take the title – but for now they must accept their trophyless fate and role of punchbag as 17 years of frustration rushes out towards them from their neighbours.
There’s no getting away from it at this time: whatever happens to any team in football, the joke is somehow always on Arsenal. Warra trophy.