In this season’s Premier League look down for the real drama

What’s the opposite of a cliffhanger? As the Premier League packs up for its winter break, as those depleted muscle fibres begin to regain their tensile strength, as English World Cup glory is all-but guaranteed (this was the plan wasn’t it?) by winter sun global marketing trips, it is hard to avoid the sense of dramatic entropy.

The Premier League has always sold itself as blockbusting cinematic entertainment. As every screenwriter knows the key ingredient of any pulp drama is tension, obstacles, storylines that twang like an overtightened steel guitar string. Twenty-odd games in, the season has dished up something very different.

What we have here is a first act marked by the absence of tension: the greatest league in the history of leagues being great, reimagined as a piece of Japanese anti-cinema, all soporific repetition and meandering story arcs.

Can we still fluff up some kind of title race out of this thing? Those hopes of a three-way pursuit to the line were all-but extinguished by Manchester City’s annihilating 12-match winning run from November into January. Saturday’s 1-1 draw at Southampton, during which City had 20 shots at goal and 74% possession, is pretty thin gruel when it comes to dredging up some new life.

Cut forward to early May and perhaps this perfectly calibrated machine, this suffocating blue mist, a squad so perfectly grooved it has come closer than any other English team to making victory an inevitability, might be persuaded to collapse in a heap of nerves and shanked passes. We might yet see a damp-eyed Pep, headphones clamped, finger jabbing into the camera lens, saying: “I’ve kept quiet about this but when you say that about a man like Thomas Frank, well, you can tell Jürgen, if he’s