When There's Nothing Else, There's Schadenfreude

Another Holte End Gem. The levels this works on, my god...

Regular readers will know I use that particular German word a bit too often, but shameful joy is the bread and butter of English football. The Holte End, many of whom had long given up on anything approaching a meaningful season and still recovering from the heart cramping noise of Martin Laursen's announced early retirement, had nothing else to offer on the last day of the season but a banner reading, "SOB on the Tyne."

This unfortunately is what Aston Villa's 2008-09 Premier League season will be remembered for: sending Newcastle down to the pits of hell (or the most exciting league in England, depending on your station in life) with all the perfunctory style of an bank foreclosing on a dying pensioner. Memories of Champions League fairies dancing around Brummy heads have been long wiped clean since our now-annual March lobotomy. Beating Newcastle didn't even put us into fifth; Fulham couldn't be bothered to make Everton break a sweat, and so we're right back to where we started: not quite as good as Everton.

Yes, next year, dot dot dot. Summer transfer deals I'll be resorting to self harm to force myself to write about, close inspecting what new Emile Heskeys and Zat Knights Martin O'Neill has in store for us. It's funny to think that at the start of the season, O'Neill's deals were considered a model for other mid-sized clubs. Shrewd was in. The economy had collapsed, banks had failed, bailouts were on their way. Randy Lerner looked like the perfect owner for uncertain times, Arsenal were the model Big Four club, Manchester United's debts looked like a sack of hammers.

Now, in May, Arsenal aren't in anything. The FA Cup final will be handed from Portsmouth to either Manchester United or Chelsea, that sack of hammers is still on course for another treble year, and Aston Villa, like an overacheiving high school student sobered by her first year of university, went from hopes of winning the Premier League title to hopes of Champions League qualification to hopes Martin Laursen would return to hopes that Setanta would get a nice shot of the "Who's Your Next Messiah?" anti-Newcastle banner. The Eee Pee El doesn't want to bend to our new financial reality. Money still wins everything in the English top flight.

Save for Manchester City of course.