12 Dominoes from the Premier League Title

Lately leading football pundits have had to inject a cavaet as they talk about whether Manchester City or Liverpool will lift the Premier league title this year.  That cavaet is an acknowledgement that Tottenham are "technically" still in the title hunt, though the thought of this third horse in the race is also dismissed with an additional aside that shows that these pundits do not see that happening.  The ultimate cavaet thrown in my some pundits is that if Tottenham win their last 12 games, then they can win the title.  That is true as saying that Liverpool and Manchester City need to be near perfect also.

Yet the belief that Spurs are realistic title contenders is met with the fact that four of these last 12 matches are against Top Six teams, and against Top Six teams Tottenham's record has consistently been poor.  While Spurs are known for a much better second half of the season than the first half, they are also known to run out of steam in the final four or five games.  This year however, without their best two players Harry Kane and Dele Alli they have won four matches without them.   It was clear that those two top players looked jaded having not taken a rest during the last World Cup and when they return, they will have received the very rest their manager Pochettino did not give them and more importantly, they as individual players did not want to have.

The link between Tottenham and the NFL gets stronger and stronger and the injury to Harry Kane only has served to reinforce that linkage.  Kane is as it happens a New England Patriots fan and the injury led to him recuperating by getting tickets to watch the Patriots win the Superbowl this year against the LA Rams.  When he returns he does so having tasted that champions winner feeling by watching a dynasty that embodies a champions mindset.

So it is that we have to wait for a dozen games before we know if this is going to be a fairy tale year for Tottenham and the year also that takes the monkey off the Tottenham's manager back that he has never won any title of note.  The irony is that should Pochettino win the title with Spurs, it makes it less likely he will go to Manchester United, but if he does, it sets up Tottenham very well for the future because the asking price for Manchester United to prize away Pochettino is going to get that much more astronomical.   With Manchester City's devastating destruction of Chelsea today, Chelsea fans are beginning to see the nightmare of their champion status beginning to disappear.  While Tottenham have lost the hoodoo of not winning at Stamford Bridge for two decades, the last thing either Arsenal or Chelsea fans want to see is a Tottenham team this now the best club in London, but more importantly a mentality that replaces them as winners.