Leicester manage not to get thumped by Liverpool, which is almost as good as winning - The Warm-Up

FRIDAY'S BIG STORIES Crisis Deferred Ad/> Let's be honest, friends. Sure, we all like to pretend that the appeal of the Premier League is watching the best players work for the best managers. Maybe we nod to the pace, the commitment and intensity.

Or we do our best to maintain the cute little fiction that «anybody can beat anybody». (It's not true. You can't beat Manchester City.) TransfersMan Utd target Pochettino and Ten Hag as Rangnick replacement — Paper Round4 HOURS AGO But get right down to it, and the Premier League, as a spectacle, does one thing better than anything else.

That thing is Crisis. And it is the Crisis that we're really here for: rubberneckers on the motorway, sickos at the window. So if you tuned in to Leicester City away at Liverpool hoping for something messy, spectacular, and even apocalyptic … you weren't alone.

But we didn't get it. Instead we got a 2-0 home win, which is one of football's most mundane scorelines. Liverpool were comfortably the better team, but that would probably be happening if Leicester weren't A Crisis Club.

Anyone can beat anyone. Terms and conditions apply. So while the rest of us were feeling a little short-changed, we're guessing that Brendan Rodgers is feeling just a little bit relieved.

After the game he noted that «Tonight was not just about the result but about restoring pride,» which we're choosing to translate as something like «Oh thank you, thank you, thank you, we got out alive». The diagnosis after the Forest defeat was that the club needed a refresh; the rest of the season, then, is about whether Rodgers is going to be the man to oversee it. As a club, Leicester find themselves in an unusual position: they've spent the last couple of seasons overachieving by