Something changes for players in the Premier League when winter turns to spring. The dark nights and the yellow match ball are behind you for another season, replaced by bright afternoon games and the white ball. This final stretch of the season is still a time of hope for many teams, but a dip in form quickly turn that into despair. Everyone is playing for something, and one mistake can define your season.
Up to this point of the campaign, teams and coaching staff have been focused primarily on performance levels — how well is the manager’s playing style bedding in? Which players are forming effective partnerships? But by the time you get to March and April, the reality is that it’s all about the outcome. Results are the most important thing. If you’re down at the bottom, you have to get a result. If you’re up near the top, it’s a must-win game. Springtime is business time.
Even with Liverpool, who have a 13-point lead on Arsenal at the top of the table having played an additional game, have moved into the mode of just getting it done. Their general performances were probably at a higher level a few months ago, whereas now they’re finding ways to get results, which is the sign of a team that is worthy of winning a league title. They are not just the best team in the country. They have also shown in the last few weeks after a couple of bad setbacks — exiting the FA Cup to lower-league Plymouth and then being held to a combustible draw at Everton which earned their manager a touchline ban — that they are also the best at getting the job done.
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Of course, all 38 games of a campaign have the same number of points available, but at this stage of the season those results become more pivotal. Last season, there was one weekend in April when Liverpool and Arsenal were both above Manchester City but lost at home to Crystal Palace and Aston Villa respectively. That allowed City to go above them, and they held on to that lead for the rest of the season. If those results had happened in gameweek 12 or 13, they could have been written as stumbles with a lot of road still ahead of them. But, when it happens with only five games left, there is barely any time to bounce back.
City are way out of the picture for the league and Europe this season — they are 20 points behind Liverpool in fourth and out of the Champions League — but they still need to be getting results. Even with the Premier League likely to have five qualification spots for next season’s Champions League, City cannot relax. They are away at third-placed Nottingham Forest next and then play the Brighton & Hove Albion, who are currently on the longest winning run in the league. So even though they are in the unfamiliar position of not chasing for the title, they still are in a position whereby they know the value of every single game. They’ve had to adjust their goals from the start of the season, but this is the final objective; they need to be in the Champion League next season. The players know that — it’s important not only for their status as stars but potentially for their futures at the club. So that’s the thing that will be motivating them on a day-to-day basis.
Pep Guardiola’s team are still in the FA Cup, too, and there is no situation in which results trump performances than knockout cup football. How many cup finals are actually great games? In general, people remember the winners of finals, not how they won.
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Whether you are at the top of the league or fighting relegation, everything just feels that bit more definitive. Wolverhampton Wanderers may have a cushion between them and the relegation zone, where Ipswich and Leicester are five points behind them, but that is only two wins for either of those sides and two losses for Wolves. Trying to get two wins is one thing, but trying to get two wins of your last three games when you are battling to stay up and then also looking out for the results of the teams around you is something else entirely.
That’s a situation that those teams should be doing their utmost to avoid while they still have 10-11 games left, because depending on other teams is a difficult place to be. The aim at the end of the season to be playing for something and to have your fate in your own hands but sometimes. when you are requiring other things to go your way, it can really affect the mood if they don’t.
Some of the games against teams down near at the bottom could actually be really tough, especially when you’re away from home, because they are desperate. So you need teams that aren’t just going to focus purely on the football, but understand that the nature of this game is different to what it could have been earlier in the season.
You want all your players available to this important stretch because you know the gravity of every single game. The pressure rises for everyone now, based on the goals that they are trying to achieve. And when some teams are outperforming what others might have expected of them, as a consequence that puts an internal pressure on that team but also squeezes the teams around them who suddenly have another rival to worry about.
For teams who have real genuine requirements, whether it be the vital financial boost of reaching the Champions League or avoiding the potential calamity of relegation, the team getting the results they need in this final stretch can be change the fate of the football club. The pressure is massive. The fans will feel it, the players will feel it, the management will feel it. And so when you go out in those matches, if you win, it feels great, but if you’re losing all of a sudden there’s a more anxiety from everyone involved.
ESPN analyst Nedum Onuoha was speaking to Tony Mabert.
