Christ it’s tight in here

Rest assured this is a post about soccer/football.   Really.  The old adage of one wins nothing in November in the Premier League gets thrown out ad nauseum every year.  If a Man U finds itself 16th in the league after four games finding a pundit reaching for the panic button is about as easy as finding a pre-op transsexual on Bourbon Street at four in the morning.  They abound like a pestilence sent by God to punish the unwashed.  A whole cadre of modern day Cassandras try to prove the sharpness of their acumen by predicting the demise of all we hold sacred.  And in the sporting world pundits such as these will flock to any mild hiccup or slip-up any team may suffer.  Usually I write such people off as insufferable dilatantes.  But what happens when said people are right.  Looking at the bottom half of the Premier League a mere four points separtes the teams from 20th to tenth positions.  With only a third of the season behind us, it’s still too early to predict anything.  Yet has the relegation battle seen anything as tight as this in recent years.  There are no clear cut candidates for dropping to the Championship.  In fact long storied clubs as Newcastle and Tottenham are seriously in danger of falling out of the top flight.  Usually I am of the opinion that the newly promoted become fodder for the established EPL teams to gain much needed points.  But looking at the promoted troika of WBA, Stoke City, and Hull City, they are proving to be highly unwilling victims.  So where will the threatened find easy points during this season?  The answer is nowhere.  The big story for this season may not be a changing within the “Big Four”, but how tight the relegation battle will be.  Come May having as many as eight teams fighting for EPL survival will not surprise me at all.  Maybe parity is slowly growing within the confines of merry England after all.