Brighton, a team they had already beaten twice in the league, awaited the winners in the last four. Playing well and 1-0 up, Fulham were looking at a first FA Cup semi-final appearance since 2002. It feels overly simplistic to say it but Fulham’s season changed in the space of a matter of seconds - specifically, the 72nd minute of their FA Cup quarter-final at Old Trafford on March 19. Only time will tell if his successor can stage a belated great escape. Should Lampard have gone sooner in order to prevent such a nerve-wracking finale? Many Everton fans think so. Sean Dyche came in with a significantly reduced window in which to address a gathering negative momentum and it is proving difficult for him to make an impact as Everton continue to fight for survival. Instead, Everton went into the World Cup break still hoping Lampard could turn things around, and it would need another six winless games for them to realise he could not. But that was not the biggest error about the decision, it was the timing. Many Chelsea fans will say sacking Thomas Tuchel in September was a mistake and that is understandable given he led the club to the Champions League trophy in 2021. So many to choose from during this disastrous season, but I think you can go back to where it all started to go wrong and that was before a ball was kicked in the summer. The performance and the result against Chelsea was the catalyst for what Brighton have become under the passionate Italian perfectionist. It’s easily forgotten now that De Zerbi’s reign began with two points from five games, failing to score in three of those. That was more important than putting one over Potter and the backroom staff he took with him to Stamford Bridge. It was the first meaningful evidence of the juicy promise ahead under Roberto De Zerbi. It has to be outplaying Chelsea, thumping them 4-1 on Graham Potter’s return to the Amex at the end of October. That result was the catalyst for a 12-match unbeaten run which propelled Brentford up the table and extinguished any fears they would suffer from second-season syndrome. The striker was a constant menace and Brentford shocked the champions with a 98th-minute winner. However, Ivan Toney responded to being left out of England’s World Cup squad with a superb performance. They had not won in the league for four matches and got knocked out of the Carabao Cup by fourth-tier side Gillingham a few days earlier. Things were looking ominous for Thomas Frank’s side before the trip to the Etihad. It has to be Brentford’s incredible 2-1 victory over Manchester City just before the World Cup break. Parker’s assistant Gary O’Neil stepped up, and with new owner Foley investing around £50million ($62.8m) in the January window, he was able to steer Bournemouth clear of a relegation many had forecasted. This frustrated head coach at the time Scott Parker, who said the squad were “under-equipped” for the Premier League just four games into the campaign, comments which led to his sacking. Outgoing owner Maxim Demin was always unlikely to strengthen an asset he was looking to sell, so Bournemouth’s summer transfer outlay was minimal. The process is understood to have begun in the summer and was formally completed in December - a crucial stretch of the Premier League calendar. It kickstarted a turbulent chain of events, but the club now seem to have found their feet. It has to be Bill Foley’s Bournemouth takeover. Villa’s deserve credit for one that has gone astonishingly well. Club owners get rightly criticised for bad decisions. Emery’s Villa are now in a European chase that nobody saw coming. The Spaniard has secured a remarkable 42 points from 21 league games so far - two out of every possible three - the best record of any Villa manager in history. Replacing him with Unai Emery changed everything. Villa were circling the drain under Steven Gerrard after a miserable 3-0 defeat at Fulham in October. But to lose on penalties and for Saliba’s injury to end up a lengthy one, it was the worst of both worlds and unsettled the defence in the run-in. If it hadn’t happened that night, it might have happened in the following game, or to someone else. It turned out to be a costly night as they lost both Takehiro Tomiyasu and Saliba to injury, with the latter’s absence proving to be a huge miss in April as Arsenal dropped nine points in four games to hand Manchester City the initiative in the title race.
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