Who made the biggest Villa mistake? Is Maresca Chelsea’s most likeable face? Why pick Liverpool over Newcastle? – The Briefing

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Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic has discussed three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football in England.

This was the weekend when Premier League clubs definitely said goodbye to Kevin De Bruyne, probably said farewell to Alejandro Garnacho and might yet have said see ya mate to Ange Postecoglou.

Here, we discuss the Champions League qualification race ending in disappointment and farce for Aston Villa, whether it’s time to reluctantly start praising Chelsea and why we can’t really say much about Newcastle’s match, because we didn’t see it.

Who made the worst mistake as Villa missed the Champions League?

There were two seriously bad errors of judgement at Old Trafford on Sunday and, for once, Manchester United were guilty of neither of them.

Referee Thomas Bramall made a split-second decision to blow his whistle when he believed (with good reason, from the distance away that he was standing) that Villa’s Morgan Rogers had kicked the ball out of United goalkeeper Altay Bayindir’s hands.

Given that VAR could not overrule the call because he blew his whistle before Rogers then put said ball in the net, it was an error, a momentary lapse of judgement, and yes, there probably should be an eyebrow raised about how a referee with more EFL than Premier League games under his belt this season was given one of the three big matches on the final day, while someone like Michael Oliver, who has been the ref for two FA Cup finals and was picked for the European Championship last summer, was on VAR duty for the meaningless Tottenham Hotspur versus Brighton fixture.

But, ultimately, Villa goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez’s lapse of judgement 30 minutes earlier in the game was much harder to forgive than Bramall’s.

If the Argentinian’s last act in a Villa shirt was to adequately reflect his five years at the club it should probably have been an incredible reflex save, but something zany or wacky is still pretty appropriate, albeit this was probably the stupidest mistake he had ever made for Unai Emery’s side, considering what was at stake on the day.

It was one thing to race 40 yards from his goal in a frantic panic over Matty Cash’s underhit backpass, but it was another to then deliberately (and very forcefully) barge United striker Rasmus Hojlund to the ground, with absolutely no intention of playing the ball.

Martinez delivers his barge on Hojlund (Photo: Neville Williams/Aston Villa FC via Getty Images)

With hindsight — and a quick glance at Hojlund’s record of four league goals in 31 appearances this season before Sunday — Martinez would happily have let the Dane try his luck from a narrow angle with his left foot, open goal or not.

United defender Harry Maguire laughing in his face as Martinez pleaded his innocence after being sent off said it all.

Villa have lodged a complaint with the Premier League that Bramall was given the game in the first place, but that just comes across as more poor judgement in the heat of the moment.

Given the way Villa approached the match against a United team who were about as there for the taking as a turkey at Christmas, Emery could have no complaints with the result, even if they felt they should have been thrown a lifeline by the officials.

They were disappointingly anaemic and passive, letting the game pass them by in a manner that recalled last month’s awful FA Cup semi-final performance against Crystal Palace.

It’s a real shame for Villa, who overcame big hurdles this year, including a lack of squad depth, the winter-window departure of Jhon Duran, a big mid-season slump and the difficulties of combining Premier League commitments with a run to the Champions League quarter-finals and the last four of the aforementioned FA Cup run.

They were so close to achieving what they wanted; goal difference away from fifth (and Champions League qualification) and only two points short of last season’s total. That they didn’t reach those milestones on the campaign’s final day was more their own fault than that of the referee.

What’s likeable about Chelsea? Well, Maresca for one

Chelsea are back in the Champions League. Hurrah for football!

Yeah, it’s quite hard for many football fans who lack blue proclivities to be happy about Enzo Maresca’s team pipping Nottingham Forest and Villa to a Champions League spot.

The money they spend, the decisions they make… they’re just not very likeable to lots of non-Chelsea supporters.

And look, Forest aren’t exactly the easiest club to like either when they do things such as ban Sky Sports pundits from their stadium, or call the impartiality of referees into question, or sign 341 new players each summer and see what sticks, but they’re new, they’re fresh, their story is exciting and their long-suffering fans deserve success.

Villa, too, while they haven’t exactly done it on the cheap either, are to be admired. They are fun to watch and Villa Park has been one of the most stirring grounds in the country to visit in the past few seasons.

Not much of the above is applicable to Chelsea in the eyes of many, but they and head coach Enzo Maresca do deserve respect for achieving what many thought/hoped they would fail to accomplish in finishing fourth.

Maresca celebrates Chelsea reaching the Champions League (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)

The past three seasons have, in terms of league position, seen the kind of upward trajectory that Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur will now hope to repeat; going from 12th in 2023, to sixth last year under Mauricio Pochettino and now fourth with Maresca.

How they’ve got there isn’t in the ‘How to sensibly run a football’ manual. They’ve gone through five managers and spent £778million (that’s a net spend, according to Transfermarkt) to win, at the time of writing, precisely no trophies. And for a club of their size, the UEFA Conference League is about as difficult to win as if they were parachuted into the EFL Trophy.

So yes, in theory they should, for the eye-watering money they’ve spent, have achieved more. But then United, Spurs, Manchester City, West Ham or even Ipswich if they finished where they wanted to this season. Each of those had a higher net spend last summer than Chelsea.

Which is where we come to what is likeable about Chelsea.

Well, two things. One, they are a youthful team (the youngest in the league), trying to build for the long term around the likes of Moises Caicedo, Enzo Fernandez, Cole Palmer, Nicolas Jackson and Levi Colwill, all aged 22 to 24.

They’re not exactly Premier League newbies Sunderland, with an abundance of homegrown talents and local heroes, but they have at least looked to some kind of long-term project by directing their millions at young players who they think will improve both the team and the club’s transfer balance in the future.

The other thing to be admired is Maresca himself, who in the past two seasons has stuck unwaveringly to his principles in the face of no small opposition from his own team’s supporters and been rewarded with first the Championship title trophy at Leicester and now a Champions League spot with Chelsea.

“I think with Maresca, the way he thinks about football is light years above everyone else,” Colwill said recently.

It’s high-tariff football — and for all their willingness to sign and dispense with players like they are £5 notes, Chelsea still bafflingly haven’t signed a goalkeeper comfortable with playing out from the back — but if/when it clicks, the ceiling is high for them. Maresca enlists Simone Biles-level high-risk, high-reward techniques while, to be fair (and yes, they won, which is all that matters), his Tottenham counterpart Ange Postecoglou went for a Peter Kay-esque running bomb in the Europa League final last week.

Chelsea will no doubt make some inexplicable moves in the transfer market this summer, but the most important decision they can make is to keep Maresca and give him players to enact his football.

It won’t make Chelsea likeable to many — not much can do that — but it might propel them even further up the Premier League table.

Why were Liverpool picked over Newcastle?

While it wasn’t the edge-of-your-seat, drama-filled afternoon we hoped for in the Premier League, certainly at a rather placid City Ground, there was tension to be found elsewhere, not least at Newcastle, where Eddie Howe’s team came so, so close to throwing away their Champions League dream.

Not that television viewers in the UK were able to experience any of that drama, because Sky Sports had rather inexplicably chosen to screen Liverpool’s bore draw with Crystal Palace instead.

With just three live TV broadcast slots available to its UK partners on the final day, the Forest/Chelsea and United/Villa matches were rightly screened, but for Sky to go to Anfield instead of St James’ Park, or even Craven Cottage, where Manchester City may have needed a result against Fulham to make the top five, was perplexing.

Newcastle’s cameras captured the celebrations but Sky’s did not show the game (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

“That’s the wonderful thing about this league, you can never take anything for granted,” co-commentator Alan Smith (drafted in for the banned Gary Neville) said at the City Ground when news of Everton’s opener (which turned out to be the winner) at Newcastle came through. “Any scoreline, any result, you just never know.”

Yep, you never know, unless you’re Sky and you want the viewing figures that a massive club like Liverpool bring, knowing full well their dead-rubber will be a dog of a game with a trophy lift at the end.

As Sky told us at least five times during the Forest coverage, they’ll be showing 215 matches next season, up from 128 this year. At least that reduces the chances of them not showing us the ones that actually matter.

Coming up

• You think the season is done? Absolutely not. There are still three finals to be navigated in the next six days, starting with the climax of the League Two promotion play-offs on Monday. Alliteration fans will be delighted that Wimbledon are taking on Walsall at Wembley. It may only be the fourth tier of English football but there will still be almost 50,000 in attendance.
• Which means it’ll have a bigger crowd than the UEFA Conference League final in Poland on Wednesday, because the Tarczynski Arena in Wroclaw has a capacity of 42,000. Chelsea may have faced the likes of Noah, Shamrock Rovers and the current 11th-best team in Sweden (Djurgarden) to get this far, but Real Betis (who just finished sixth in La Liga) represent their sternest test in the competition, which is exactly how it should be in a final. In-form Manchester United loanee Antony and former Spurs player Giovani Lo Celso are Betis’ ones to watch, if you’re a fan of narratives.
• On Friday, England’s Lionesses take on Portugal at Wembley in the Nations League.
• And then on Saturday, in Munich, a game which needs no introduction, so we’ll just take up nine last words of your time; it’s the Champions League final, Paris Saint-Germain versus Inter.

(Top photo: Grtty Images)

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