Against all odds, a compelling season has broken out

IT has been a week for considering questions of space and time.

Juan Mata arrival has renewed confodence at Old Trafford.

IT has been a week for considering questions of space and time. Tim Sherwood declared that Manchester City's football belonged on a different planet. A frustrated Jose Mourinho suggested that West Ham United had played football from two centuries past.

You know things are getting confusing when managers evoke the space-time continuum, so let us just say that these are days in which accepted truths are being challenged and logic turned on its head.

When was the last time you heard an English team feted in the terms that Sherwood, Tottenham Hotspur head coach, used to describe City's performance in winning 5-1 at White Hart Lane this week? Manchester United circa 2008? Arsenal circa 2004? Manuel Pellegrini's team has won 18 of its past 20 matches in all competitions, scoring a barely conceivable 69 goals in the process, and yet it took a dramatic midweek, in which it excelled while Arsenal and Chelsea dropped points, to give this wonderful side, built around the power of Yaya Toure, the grace of David Silva and the precision of Sergio Aguero, Alvaro Negredo and Edin Dzeko, the chance to establish even a one-point lead at the top of the Premier League.

Analysis of City can easily be skewed by their hesitant start to life under Pellegrini, losing four of its first 11 Premier League matches, but even after those defeats, it is on course for 87 points, rather than last season's 78. Arsenal is on course for 86 after last season's 73. Chelsea is on course for 83 after last season's 75. Liverpool, dancing to Brendan Rodgers's tune, is on course for 76 after last season's 61 (and 52, 58 and 63 over the three years before that). Great strides are being made and not all of them at Manchester United's expense, even if it may feel like that at times.

This is shaping into a glorious season. It is not just the excellence of City or the resurgence of Arsenal and Chelsea, who have won one Premier League title between them since 2006. It is the likelihood that one remaining Champions League berth will be contested between Liverpool and Everton, both in a state of depression for a couple of years, Tottenham, a strange case, and, remarkably, United.

It is also the almighty tussle in the lower half of the table, where just six points separate Swansea City, in 12th place, from Cardiff City, at the bottom.

Somehow, given the enormously disparate financial circumstances across a league in which ownership plays far too great a part, we are on course for a wonderful Premier League campaign. Whether that translates to the Champions League stage may be a different question, since Manchester City and Arsenal have been drawn to face Barcelona and Bayern Munich respectively in the first knockout stage, but it is certainly possible to look upon English prospects with more excitement than over the previous four seasons, in which Chelsea's somewhat freakish 2012 triumph bucked a trend of Premier League decline from the heady period from 2005 to 2009.

There was a time when Manchester United could have afforded its standards to dip on the domestic front, as it undoubtedly has done, whether in the short term or otherwise, since David Moyes took over from Alex Ferguson. In fact, it has only four points fewer than it did after 23 games in its treble-winning campaign of 1998-99 and two points fewer than in its double-winning campaign three years earlier, but back then it won the Premier League with 79 and 82 points respectively; at the present rate it will have to hit the high 70s, barely dropping a point between now and May, just to claim a top four place.

If you were to suggest that the Premier League table were to reflect a widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, of course you would be right; City has been transformed by the wealth of Abu Dhabi in an era in which Aston Villa is struggling to find a natural level under the chairmanship of the former owner of the Cleveland Browns American football franchise, while Everton strives to outperform the balance sheet and Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and United, by no means at the peak of its respective powers, watch the commercial revenue from kit sponsors, automotive partners and snack partners roll in.

Against all odds, though, out of the depressing reality of 21st-century football economics, a compelling season has broken out.

Liverpool's total of 46 points would have had it top of the Premier League at this stage in 1998-99, but the bookmakers' odds, offering less than even money for a top-four finish, seem to underestimate the potential for an upswing at Old Trafford, where confidence has been renewed by Juan Mata's arrival.

As for the battle to avoid relegation, it threatens to be sheer chaos.

Palace looked down and out, but its improvement under Tony Pulis, taking it from five points adrift in mid-November to four points clear of the relegation zone by the end of January, shows the value of changing manager sooner rather than later.

So does Sunderland's progress under Gustavo Poyet. The struggles of Cardiff City and Fulham, though, under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Rene Meulensteen, offer a warning to Norwich City, West Ham United and others that it is not as simple as all that.

So, an epic season compelling at the very top, in the battle for fourth place and the scramble to avoid relegation.

If Manchester City's football is, as Sherwood has it, from a different planet, it reflects well on the English Premier League that we still have a title race on our hands, with Chelsea heading to the Etihad Stadium on Monday.

The Times