The battle for Premiership survival continues
With a mere four points separating 15th position Blackburn and last place Wigan Athletic, there is just no telling who exactly will survive or suffer the drop. Wolves, West Ham, Birmingham and Blackpool also make up the five teams who are all the main competitors with each other for trying to stay up. The bottom of the league has rarely been so close and compact, so who exactly is going to be victorious in the quest of beating relegation is, at the moment, anyone’s guess.
Based on recent form, you’d have to say that none of the teams particularly deserve to stay up. Between them, in all of their past six games, they have collectively mustered only seven wins, 13 draws and 16 losses. For Premier League standard, this is very poor. Each of the teams have differing fortunes and runs of form throughout the campaign, for example West Ham at one point were rock bottom with barely any hope of catching. They are now slowly climbing their way to potential safety despite losing at the weekend.
For Blackpool on the other hand it’s a different story. The Tangerines were at one point 8th in the league, and were causing several upsets in the league such as back to back victories over Liverpool. Thanks to several losses, and injuries to pivotal players like Charlie Adam however, they now find themselves desperate for victory. We did however see this weekend that they are more than capable of competing with top teams when they were often dominating Arsenal, despite losing.
Based on the season as a whole, and generally because of the quality of the teams, West Ham, Wolves and Wigan would be my best bet for relegation. With Birmingham having a game in hand and Blackpool and Blackburn showing signs of improvement, I’d like to think none of them could sink into the bottom three. Having said that, as seen many, many times before in the Premier League, anything, and I mean absolutely anything, can happen. 9th place Newcastle are only eight points in front of last place Wigan. So who knows, even they could go on a bad run of form and drop several places down the league. Similar to the top of the table, you simply can’t predict what is going to happen.
The next eight weeks will undoubtedly be cram packed with plenty of action, upsets and shocks in the Premier League, with the bottom six being heavily involved. Each have at least one game against one of the top five teams and against one of their fellow strugglers, so they’ll all be looking to gain as many points as possible. It’s going to be scrappy; its going to be fierce and its going to be extremely interesting to see how the bottom of the table pans out. But who will it be?
