Midlands malaise and the ghost of Premier League sackings to come

We don’t want to get too excited, but there are signs The Fiver’s tireless STOP FOOTBALL campaign may be finally bearing fruit. With the hastily-convened Respect Break rolling into the international break, a number of Premier League teams are looking at four full weeks between fixtures. The knock-on effect is that, with an extended Human Rights World Cup sabbatical looming, the top-flight table will be an uneven, unsatisfying jumble for some time. Just look at the state of it!

It’s hard to extract too much narrative from this particular set of data, but by running the numbers through our Fivermetrics™ supercomputer, we can predict a rough year ahead for the top-flight’s midlands giants. Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, Wolves and Leicester City have won 48 major trophies between them. Sadly, this season they have already collectively conceded 56 goals, and are all currently in the bottom six. Leicester are bringing up the rear after giving up on the whole enterprise of being a football club – signing players, marking at set-pieces, stuff like that. New centre-back Wout Faes, a sort of ersatz David Luiz, is unlikely to improve matters.

The next/first assignment for under-fire boss Brendan Rodgers/new manager Sean Dyche will be a Monday night derby against Forest’s … ah, under-fire boss Steve Cooper/new manager Sean Dyche, whose side are starting to resemble a cruel mid-2000s reality TV experiment, where a historic club punch their ticket back to the big time, only to have their entire squad replaced overnight. At least it’s likely to be entertaining, which is more than can be said for Wolves. Across England’s top six tiers, only Gillingham have scored fewer than the three goals mustered by Bruno Lage’s lukewarm-shots so