Vieira, Lampard and Gerrard all have big hands to play in Premier League finale

Shared between them are 17 ‘caps’ for the Premier League’s most illustrious team - that’s the XI that, each season, fellow professionals elect as the very best in English football’s top division.

When Patrick Vieira was playing for Arsenal, he was voted as the league’s most essential central midfielder for six successive years. When Frank Lampard was at his high work-rate, high goalscoring peak as a Chelsea midfielder, he was picked three seasons on the trot for the Professional Footballers’ Association all-star side.

Lampard and Vieira coincided in that XI in 2003/04, when Steven Gerrard was also included, one of Gerrard’s record eight selections for the PFA Premier League Team of the Year while he was a Liverpool player.

This is the first season this trio of iconic former midfielders have coincided as Premier League managers, and as it approaches its close, they are once again monitoring each other’s moves. Vieira will take his Crystal Palace to Lampard’s Everton this evening with their respective clubs in reverse positions to those that were widely forecast at the beginning of the season.

Vieira, asked to take over at Palace from Roy Hodgson last summer, had been predicted serious challenges in his first job as a first-team manager in English football, and that one of those challenges might be a battle against the threat of relegation. That possibility has been skilfully kept away by Vieira, whose Palace have already exceeded the 44 points they achieved last season, and reached an FA Cup semi-final.

Burnley’s penultimate fixture takes them to Aston Villa tonight and another episode in a surreal series of Villa games in which Gerrard, the Villa manager since November, has a direct influence on the fortunes of the major