LIVE: Real Betis vs Real Madrid – La Liga
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Five games to go: The Premier League’s unpredictable season turns again
This was supposed to be Arsenal’s title. For 200 days, it looked like it would be. But Wednesday night, Erling Haaland scored his 35th goal of the season after five minutes at Turf Moor, and Manchester City went top of the Premier League for the first time since October. Arsenal’s 200-day lead was gone, just like that, to a team that three weeks ago looked like they had run out of steam. I am a Manchester United supporter. I have no dog in this fight. So honestly, watching this title race from the outside has been one of the most entertaining things the Premier League has produced in years. Not because the football has always been brilliant. Because it really has not. But because absolutely nothing has gone the way anyone expected. Arsenal were supposed to win this! The title felt done. Football journalists were already writing the “Arsenal end the wait” pieces and filing them for publication on whatever Sunday it became official. Then Bournemouth beat them at home. Then they lost at the Etihad to goals from Rayan Cherki and Erling Haaland. Then last night, City beat Burnley, and Arsenal’s 200-day stint at the top was over. Now they have no tie-breaker advantage. If the two clubs finish level on points, goal difference and goals scored, City win the title because they have won more points in the head-to-head matches this season. Arsenal hold none of the cards. It’s a case of who blinks first, and I think Arsenal will blink. Mikel Arteta has taken Arsenal close, and he deserves some credit for that. But his performative coaching on the sideline, his cringeworthy “tricks” in training, they point to a man feeling the pressure. He’s so worked up, I think it’s translating to the pitch. Advertisement The Chelsea disaster … While the title race has been the main event, Chelsea have been providing the most genuinely extraordinary sideshow in Premier League history. Three managers in 16 months. Some 2 billion pounds ($2.7bn) spent on players. Seventh in the table. And my personal favourite stat of the entire season: five consecutive league games without scoring, the first time that has happened to Chelsea since 1912. Their most recent manager, Liam Rosenior, was sacked this week. He had been in the job for 106 days on a six-and-a-half-year contract. He is perhaps best remembered for a news conference in January where he explained that the word “manage”, split into two, gives you “man” and “age” and that, therefore, management means “ageing men”. He aged extremely quickly. He is now 41 and unemployed. The week he was sacked, Chelsea’s parent company published accounts showing operating losses of 689 million pounds ($930m) over three years. That is a loss of 629,000 pounds ($850,000) every single day. For three years. At a football club that cannot beat Brighton. There is a serious point buried in the Chelsea comedy. Spending money without a coherent plan is not a strategy. The clubs who disrupted the established order this season, Bournemouth above all, did it through organisation and intelligence. Bournemouth sold their five best players for a combined 250 million pounds ($338m) in 18 months. Their manager, Andoni Iraola, adapted, rebuilt and is still on course to finish in the top half while playing some of the most attractive football in the country. Bournemouth beat Arsenal at the Emirates. They beat Liverpool at Anfield. Chelsea spent many times their budget and could finish below them. When did it turn? If I had to pick one result that changed everything, it would be Southampton beating Arsenal in the FA Cup quarterfinal. Southampton were relegated the previous season. It did not cost Arsenal the title by itself. But it was the first moment where you looked at Arsenal and thought: Something is not quite right here. The composure, the belief, the ability to handle big moments and it wobbled. Once that wobble is visible, every subsequent result gets filtered through it. The Bournemouth home loss felt worse because of Southampton. The City defeat felt worse because of Bournemouth. And now with five games left and City top on goal difference, the whole thing looks like a slow unravelling that started on that day. Five to go! City have Everton away, Brentford at home, Bournemouth away, Crystal Palace at home and Villa at home on the final day. Arsenal have Newcastle at home, Fulham at home, West Ham away, Burnley at home and Crystal Palace away on the final day when they will face a club whose best player, Eberechi Eze, left for Arsenal in the summer and will be returning to the stadium where his career was made. Advertisement Arsenal also have the Champions League semifinal against Atletico Madrid to get through. City have no European football. They are rested, they are focused and Haaland has 35 goals this season with five games still to play. I said at the start of this that Arsenal were going to bottle it. I said it in February when they were nine points clear, and people were not particularly happy about it. I stand by it. The momentum, the tiebreakers, the fixture congestion and I think the mentality – all of it points towards City. But I have been watching this league for 30 years, and I have learned one thing above everything else: The Premier League will find a way to surprise you. The season that looked decided in December is never decided in December. The team that looks unbeatable in April sometimes loses to Bournemouth on a wet Tuesday night and never quite recovers. It happened to Arsenal. Maybe it happens to City too. Five games. Everything to play for. Come back and tell me I was wrong. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. Adblock test (Why?)
Chornobyl at 40: Settlers and horses survive Russian drones, contamination
Oslyak had just finished a night shift at ChNPP on April 25, and had returned to Pripyat and their cosy apartment, with its wall rugs and soft lighting typical of functional Soviet style. He slipped into bed next to Nikitina and fell into a deep sleep. At 1:23am, explosions rang out across the night sky. The city stirred in the night, and some residents woke to the blasts and an unfamiliar light on the horizon, but Nikitina and her husband remained asleep. In the plant, molten fuel burned through layers of concrete and steel towards water beneath the reactor, threatening an even greater explosion. Firefighters and workers responded, unaware of the danger, climbing onto the roof and into the wreckage as radiation surged beyond levels that humans can handle. Two Chornobyl plant workers died that night as a result of the initial explosion, and a further 28 personnel and emergency workers called to the site would die in the following weeks as a result of acute radiation poisoning. But in Pripyat, as Nikitina woke on the morning of April 26, everything seemed normal. It was Saturday, and while many plant workers were off, shops were open, and, as was the norm in the Soviet Union, children went to school. Neither she nor her husband was scheduled to work that day, but as they left the apartment for a stroll, they noticed multiple sealed vehicles loaded with heavy equipment moving through the city towards the ChNPP. They thought back to their university classes, where they had been taught what would happen if a reactor were damaged. It had been presented as such an unlikely scenario that, at the time, she said it felt almost like an old wives’ tale. Yet, they agreed that these signs had all the hallmarks of a major incident, so the couple and their child hunkered down in their apartment and made sure all the windows were tightly closed as a precaution. The morning of April 27, they woke to temporary evacuation orders blaring from loudspeakers mounted on trucks and police cars. Residents were told to gather at collection points near their buildings as there had been an incident at the ChNPP, while municipal services began distributing iodine tablets to the inhabitants of Pripyat to protect their thyroids from radiation exposure. The authorities did not tell them how severe the incident was, and they were advised to pack enough food and clothes for just three days. Before they were about to leave their apartment for evacuation, her husband received a call from the local authorities: He was needed at the plant and was told to stay behind. Nikitina recalls the moment she stood on the warm spring day, waiting with her son to board a bus. She said, although the roughly 49,000 residents of the city were evacuated in an orderly manner, she has realised in hindsight the extreme dangers they were exposed to, standing in dresses, shorts and light clothing, unaware they were immersed in a radioactive plume filled with radionuclides and aerosols. Nikitina and her son were first evacuated to Ivankiv, a town roughly 50km (30 miles) south of Pripyat and about 90km (56 miles) north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. After Soviet authorities admitted on April 28 that a disaster had occurred, news of its severity spread among the evacuees. A panicked Nikitina began desperately washing her and her son’s clothes in their temporary lodging provided by the authorities, trying to remove any contamination. As she laid them out to dry on a balcony, a dosimetrist visited her, only to discover that they contained dangerous levels of radiation and ordered them to be immediately removed and destroyed. Adblock test (Why?)
Pakistan terror racket busted in India? 2 arrested in Noida in connection with ISI-backed plot
Uttar Pradesh ATS arrested Tushar Chauhan and Sameer Khan for allegedly planning targeted killings with ties to the ISI.
TCS Nashik Row: Four employees arrested in a separate sexual harassment case, details here
ACP Sandeep Mitke, who leads the Special Investigation Team, said the newest case emerged from a complaint submitted by a male staffer of the firm.
CM Rekha Gupta-led Delhi govt to give smart cards to construction workers to plug fund leakage, check details
The Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers’ Welfare Board (DBOCWWB) has begun the process of engaging an agency to design, implement and operate the integrated digital platform, they said.
Raghav Chadha quits AAP, joins BJP along with six other Rajya Sabha MPs
The announcement has come weeks after Raghav Chadha was demoted by the AAP leadership and serves a major blow to the Arvind Kejriwal-led front. Chadha had been with the AAP since the party’s inception in 2012, working as a key aide to Kejriwal.
‘Did not want to be part of…’: Raghav Chadha reveals real reason behind leaving AAP
AAP Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha announced on Friday that he will join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). During this announcement, the Chadha told the media the real reason why he distanced himself with the party and its activities.
TCS Nashik sexual harassment case: Victim recalls she was asked to ‘go to gym to look attractive’ by arrested senior
Survivors of the TCS Nashik sexual harrasment case have been coming out to reveal their ordeal. In the latest of such case, a survivor has made fresh allegations of harassment as the probe into the alleged forced religious conversion case at Tata Consultancy Services’s Nashik unit is ongoing.
From Kumar Vishwas to Raghav Chadha: Big exits that rocked Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP since its inception
In a huge setback for the Aam Aadmi Party, Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak, and Ashok Mittal announced a split in the party, claiming that ‘two-thirds’ of the party’s members in Rajya Sabha had decided to ‘merge with the BJP’.