Six Things We Learned from This Weekend's Football

No matter who you support, there's a decent chance that at some point, on some November evening while you were drinking through to the Spanish football, overcome with anxiety, dread and flu, drastically redrafting your team's goals for the season ahead, you may have had the sense that everything was utterly, irreparably fucked. Certainly if you're a Sheffield Wednesday or Leeds United fan, but even United had the Glazers and Moyes. It comes to us all at some point.

No matter what, though, you had fuck all on Newcastle. Implosion at least has the benefit of going out in a blaze of glory – the calm resignation with which Portsmouth fans greeted their 3-0 defeats to Stoke, Derby dancing as they achieved a record low points total – because you know that football is never final, and a rebirth will be the ultimate result. For most mid-table plodders, the odd disintegration or supernova is probably a good idea once in a while. Villa and Sunderland could probably do with a relegation or two to go away and find themselves again.

For Newcastle, it's different. The season has been an unmitigated disaster, the only joy being that Alan Pardew has at last departed, rapidly negated by his success elsewhere and the hopeless John Carver. Yet there'll be no great flight of chickens coming home to roost, because this is Mike Ashley territory. It will go on, like this, perhaps for another decade or more. This is football's fate worse than death, the 1984-style situation – imagine the future of Newcastle United: Mike Williamson stamping on a human face forever, and getting sent off and the team losing to Sunderland to let them stay up for another year.

The problem is that Newcastle have no way of removing Mike Ashley. Rangers fans succeeded, but they are by and large an insane bunch, who were willing to boycott and rally en masse and smash up the club's offices, fans who are regarded as maniacs even in a country where supporters will boycott an away match because the team they'd have to visit lost a game against Celtic 30 years ago.

Geordies, in contrast, are more docile. Perhaps the most affable men in Britain. They might be geographically close to their northern cousins, but they've got a bit less of the… well, nobody doubts their resilience, so not less of the violence. Let's say, less of the sadism. They're simply a nice set of lads, and it's sad to see them being on the end of the longest and most brutal swindle since, well, Ashley tried his luck in Glasgow.

The brief renaissance enjoyed by Liverpool this season as Brendan Rodgers found a winning formula has come to a surprisingly abrupt halt. It took almost an entire season for their rivals to figure out Liverpool's last team – this time it's taken a couple of months. There may be some comfort in Van Gaal's resurgence as proof that, contrary to popular wisdom, defeat to Arsenal in a must-win game is not a sign of extreme incompetence and certain doom, but realistically any chance of fourth is gone and the season must be considered a failure.

Analysis of Rodgers' reign has been replete with talk of tactics, formations, injuries, morale and other nebulous arts of the football manager, a job we're all massively invested in and pretend to be in countless pub conversations and one-more-turn Football Manager sessions, but really don't quite understand. At least it's killed off talking about net spend, but it's hard to escape the conclusion now that Liverpool's problem is simple: they're a set of bottlers.

Of all the big games Liverpool have played this season, they've lost them all except for a home win against Man City and a home draw against an out-of-form Arsenal. They've been beaten home and away by United, lost to Chelsea in league and league cup and gone out in the first knockout round of the Europa League. They didn't win a single away fixture in Europe, and they couldn't beat a dreadful Everton side either time. More than losing, they've been suddenly tame, dreadful and insipid in each game, with form flying out of the window. The good news is that it doesn't suggest a desperate lack of quality in losing Luis Suarez. The bad news is that problems with mentality tend to be much, much harder to fix.

Liverpool, Southampton and Tottenham all dropped points this weekend, while Manchester United completed the remarkable feat of beating Aston Villa at Old Trafford. The result is that United are now almost certain to claim at least fourth place, having been at no point anywhere near looking like challenging for anything more, ending the season potless, and this will be considered a great success.

Pointing out that everybody considered David Moyes a failure for not achieving the top four and that the thick end of £200m has been spent since then is futile. The nerds, the tactics bloggers, the people who say Michael Carrick should have the England team built around him and the volunteer club PR workers have won. Van Gaal is a genius, and if you're not with the programme, you simply don't understand football.

It would be harsh to deny that their recent mini-run has been an impressive one. But it's also mostly been as a result of doing things that were so fucking obvious the most casual watcher of United has been asking why they weren't happening for months. Juan Mata is a better player than Marouane Fellaini. Wayne Rooney should probably start up front. Ander Herrera should be starting every game. If you realised this in seven months or fewer: congratulations. You too can be hailed as the saviour of the World's Biggest Club.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. But you can fool all Arsenal fans all of the time, and if you're the Arsenal manager, that's all that matters.

Like every mid-life or quarter-life crisis (and doesn't Arsenal Fan TV really capture those two demographics harder than anyone else), it's never too late to consider Arsenal in the title race. The title has basically been won since October, and yet here we are, looking at form and fixtures as though it's some titanic battle from the Keane-Vieira days. Can Arsenal do it this year? Can they? Might they just actually nick it?

In short: no. Arsenal were out of the title before your da' carved the turkey, the same as the last ten. They're not going to do it, and they probably never will while Wenger is boss. Arsene is on a trajectory of exponential decay, getting closer and closer each year but that in such a manner that it is clear that he's never actually going to ever get there. It's the same show that we've seen for a long, long time now, but it's hard not to feel a grudging respect for someone managing to rebrand the same plate of cold sick every year. There's a talent in that.

Spurs, right, will always let you down. They just will. Go and support Dulwich Hamlet or AFC Wimbledon or whatever before it's too late.

You might be of a limited, storied group of fans who considers your club to be the most depressing imaginable to support. Forest, Cov, Spurs – I hear you. I feel your pain. But you've really got nothing at all on that one team. The only team who can be guaranteed to bottle it every single time, to throw away any sense of glory, to find unique and interesting ways to fuck up anything from a dream shot to basic competence. I am referring of course, to the one, the only: Hibs. It is the perfect picture of a depressing club. Let's compare some facts with quotes from their most popular messageboard to really get a hold of how deep-set the sense of utter doom is.

Last cup final? Lost 5-0 to their greatest rivals. ("I hoped and hoped we'd get Celtic because it would've been much easier to take losing to them.") Current division? The Scottish second tier, after celebrating their rivals' relegation and immediately embarking on the worst run of form in their history to go out on penalties in Britain's first ever relegation playoff. ("There must be no worse team in the world for letting the fans down.") Last title? Just long enough ago that some old cunts are still around to remember when the team was successful. Current form? Achieved second place, then lost three in a row. ("It wouldn't be Hibs if they gave us a bit of joy, when it really matters they will let us down, history speaks for itself. Sorry, Hibs have made me like this.")

Now looking doomed to a second year in the wilderness, maybe one Sunday you can tune in on some dodgy stream and find a Hibs game. If you do so, you'll witness something akin to football's Aurora Borealis, something unique and beautiful and wonderful and spiritual – the sight of a Hibs bottle job, the absolute perfection of that widely-practiced and storied art. We can't appreciate them for anything else, but they deserve appreciation for this. True masters of a medium that no other club can hope to approach. We'll miss them if they go, but they know they never will.

Image by Sam Taylor. Follow Callum on Twitter @Callum_TH