It’s fully viable that we may see a Championship team finish the season on 96 points and not get automatic promotion, while another exceeds 50 points and still gets relegated.
Even for a division where all laws of common sense are routinely put on hold, that’s a bit much. But it’s been that kind of year in the second tier this season.
Leicester City looked to be off and away for much of the season, but a run of six defeats in ten games allowed Leeds United and newly-promoted Ipswich Town to catch them back up and turn it back into a three-way automatic promotion race that threatened to become four after Southampton overcame their own bad patch to hit form again.
(Nearly) all to play for in Championship promotion and relegation battles
The Saints are now out of the running for a top-two finish after Leicester got back to their best to claim a five-goal victory on Wednesday evening. The upshot of that is that Saints’ goal difference is just too inferior to Leeds’ for them to close the six-point gap to second with just two games to go – to say nothing of Ipswich being just a point behind Leeds with a game in hand.
But alongside Rotherham United’s early relegation and Southampton’s all-but-confirmed play-off place, nothing else in the Championship is yet assured. West Bromwich Albion and Norwich City occupy the other two available play-off spots. Both are on 72 points, and both will be keeping a close eye on Wednesday night’s clash between seventh-placed Hull City (six points behind with a game in hand) and eighth-placed Coventry City (nine points behind with two games in hand).
It’s still possible, then, that we’re looking at a three- or four-way battle for two places in the play-offs as well as automatic promotion on the final day next weekend.
The picture is not much clearer towards the bottom of the table, although Huddersfield Town or Birmingham City could be consigned to League One alongside already-relegated Rotherham this Saturday.
The two clubs, who have had seven managers between them this season, go head to head at the John Smith’s Stadium; a Huddersfield loss would definitely see them go down, while defeat for Birmingham or a point for the Terriers would leave the respective clubs nervously looking at results elsewhere to see if they still have anything to play for on the final day.
Still battling to pull away from the drop zone once and for all are Sheffield Wednesday, who climbed out for the first time since the opening weekend by beating Birmingham on Sunday; newly-promoted Plymouth Argyle, who have been there or thereabouts all season; and Blackburn Rovers, who were a top-half side for the first 21 games of the season but have won just three times since then – despite attacking midfielder Sammie Szmodics sitting top of the division’s top scorers table with 25 goals.
Stoke City and Queens Park Rangers meanwhile look like they’ve probably done enough not to get sucked back into the relegation battle having reached the 50-point mark that usually heralds safety, but a particularly nasty set of results this weekend could yet see them plunged back into a panic before the final day.
The Championship, ladies and gentlemen.
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