Monday's Fiver

[Kahnee]

With its myriad Super Sundays, Splendid Saturdays, Worthwhile Wednesdays, Terrific Tuesdays and Magnificent Mondays, it's no surprise that the Premiership is the most exciting league in the world. Unlike it's Spanish equivalent, for example, where three points separate the top five teams and players can do things like pass the ball around without giving it away. But if the Premiership really is as wonderful as carefully programmed Sky Sports drones would have us believe, it seems odd that so few teams this season are showing any great desire to win it.

 

Chelsea could have made up ground on Saturday but put in a performance so comically inept that Liverpool beat them without breaking sweat, while the MU Rowdies should have catapulted themselves into an unassailable lead, only to be thwarted by a side so unimpressive that a perfunctory header was enough to win a renowned big game bottler a big game bottle of bubbly by default. "When will Henry be hailed as the best player in the world?" enquired one of the in-no-way excitable occupants of a certain satellite channel's studio as Arsenal celebrated their win. "Imagine how much sunshine they'd be blowing up his hole if anyone had been marking him?" enquired one of the cynics sprawled across the sofa in front of the Fiver Towers plasma screen.

 

But while the MU Rowdies and Chelsea may have less stomach than a chippy Scottish tennis player when it comes to a scrap, yesterday's victory has certainly fired up Arsenal like a blacksmith's bellows. "We lost 1-0 at Sheffield and there were a lot of things to improve and think about," trumpeted Cesc Fabregas in Lahn's Lahn E'ning Stannah this afternoon. "We had a talk in the dressing room after that game and said something had to change. Since then we've shown everyone we've changed. Right now we're really, really good. Nobody can stop us if we carry on playing the way we are playing." Nobody, that is, except the Rowdies, who remain 12 points ahead of them.