Can West Ham United hang on?

 

Not much drama in the Premier League, so the most interesting aspect at the end of the season is who is going to play in the Champions League and Europa League next year. Manchester City and United are locks for the Champions League, but after that it gets interesting. Current points are Leicester City at 59, Chelsea at 58, West Ham United at 55, Liverpool at 54, Tottenham 53, and Everton 52.

I'm not going to try and look at every game; the most intriguing one is West Ham United, a team which has several noted celebrity fans, recently including Keira Knightley and Seth Meyers. And as Knightley said on his talk show back in 2014:

"That's great. Not a lot of people [in the United States] will know West Ham and I should just say we are not the sort of team who win very often. I'm really glad you picked West Ham."

There are five or six games left in the season for most teams. West Ham has a fairly easy schedule after today's loss to Chelsea, with clearly the biggest game against Everton on May 9. None of their other games is against a team in the top 10 of the 20 teams in the league. That's about as good as they could ask for.

Meanwhile, the team that I follow the most, Crystal Palace, is finishing the season just about where they've been every year -- safe from relegation but far, far away from even a whisper of a shot at the championship.   And that's the Premier League's main problem, something that the stupid Super League might have addressed, slightly -- too few times have a realistic chance of winning the title.  It is somewhat like the National Basketball Association in the USA, but hockey, football, and baseball (to an extent) have less of a separation between the haves and have-less.   Just what the Tampa Bay Rays were able to accomplish last season by adding a couple of stud pitchers (though they gave them right back) shows that uncertainty is good for the sport.   And the Premier League has little of that, which is why this Champions League/Europa League chase adds a bit of interest to the last games of the season.