City vs Chelsea, Ranieri's Jelly Sandals, and Relegation Hyperinflation: This Weekend In The Premier League

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

If the Premier League season is a Rollover hot dog, we are currently chomping on the last few mouthfuls of mushy pink sausage. As excited as we are for the final bite – that glorious mix of bread crust, excess ketchup, sloppy onion niblets and gnarled bratwurst rind – we fear its inevitable end. With that final chomp, with that last moment of exquisite satisfaction, comes the crushing realisation that it is definitively finished.

But we don't want it to end. Arsenal are the wasteful ketchup, Manchester United are the lukewarm onion shavings, any one of Tony Pulis, Sam Allardyce and Mark Hughes is the knotty bratwurst rind while, naturally, Leicester are the foamy sausage meat. Together, they are unspeakably delicious – this season, perhaps more delicious than ever before.

Let's savour these last few bites, then. Here are five talking points ahead of the next round of fixtures.

The last time Chelsea faced Manchester City in a league match, it was billed as a game that could decide the title. Now, Chelsea prepare to host a team 13 points and six places above them in the table. Despite an upturn in form during recent months, the Blues are currently 10th in the league – a mere three points above newly-promoted Bournemouth.

As such, Saturday's late kick-off at Stamford Bridge should serve as a timely reminder that Chelsea's season has been magnificently shit.

Let's not forget that they started the season with one of the most expensive squads in the division, an iconic – if borderline intolerable – manager in the form of Jose Mourinho and serious expectations of being crowned Premier League champions for the second year running. Compare the fanfare of their early season clash with City with the almost inaudible build up to this weekend's match, and it puts their dramatic decline into context.

City aren't exactly overachieving, either. It's official: obscene expenditure doesn't guarantee success.

The old "relegation six-pointer" cliché doesn't seem to be enough for people these days. Pundits have started saying "relegation-nine pointer", sometimes even "relegation 12-pointer". At this rate, there'll be massive hyperinflation of relegation points. The Premier League will start to look like the early days of the Weimar Republic, or late-nineties Zimbabwe. People will be pushing relegation points around in wheelbarrows, desperately trying to trade them in for some tinned meat or a couple of loaves of bread.

Thankfully, there'll be at least one more relegation six-pointer before the whole concept goes into a destructive spiral of unstoppable hyperbole. Sunderland travel to Carrow Road to face 17th-placed Norwich this Saturday, with the home side four points clear of Sam Allardyce's Black Cats. For obvious reasons, both teams will be desperate for a win.

Will Big Sam be able to grasp the precious points before they lose all practical value? Or will he find himself burning vast amounts of completely devalued relegation currency, just to survive the winter? Sunderland fans will hope it's the former.

As Spurs fans glance over Leicester's remaining fixtures, hysterically trying to predict where their title rivals could slip up, the Foxes' home clash with West Ham might seem like a decent bet. The Hammers have been resolute opponents this season, springing a series of upsets on the teams at the top of the table. In football parlance – the language of the beautiful game – one might say they represent something of a banana skin.

But Claudio Ranieri is immune to banana skins. He is slip free. If football managers were shoes, he would be the most durable pair of jelly sandals ever made.

Under his guidance, Leicester have singularly failed to stumble when the majority of pundits, commentators and fans have expected them to. They've been relentless recently, winning five games in a row since early March. Likewise, they've only lost one league match this year – a rather unfortunate defeat to Arsenal in mid-February.

West Ham won't be a problem. With his managerial jelly sandals on, Ranieri should grind this next banana skin to dust.

After progressing to the semi-finals of the FA Cup this week, there seems to be an optimistic fringe of Manchester United fans who are now willing to give Louis van Gaal another chance. Sure, their performances have been largely turgid this season. Yes, they did crash out of the Champions League at the group stage. Okay, so they're fifth in the league at the moment and look highly unlikely to match last year's fourth-placed finish.

Still, he's trying his best.

The thing is, Louis van Gaal's best has never really been good enough for United. His of football, his much-lauded philosophy, has always seemed at least partially lost in translation. Imagine that United do go on to win the FA Cup this year, and Van Gaal is allowed to see out the final year of his contract. Does anyone imagine that next season will be any different? Spoiler alert: it will not.

Unfortunately, no amount of bellowing "Louis van Gaal's Red Army" is going to change that. Sorry, Louis.

Let's face it, there are several games coming up this weekend that simply do not matter. We're not going to try to dress West Brom vs. Watford up as something it's not, or try to make Bournemouth vs. Liverpool out as anything other than an arbitrary act of fixture fulfilment. If there's any point to these matches, it's to herald the coming of the end of the season. Bathed in the melancholy spring sunshine, they represent the anticlimactic denouement of an end-of-season DVD that's yet to be released.

Nonetheless, don't take them for granted. They mean basically nothing in the context of the league, but they still present an opportunity to watch a bit of stress-free footie – to enjoy the game in its simplest form. These fixtures are the closest the Premier League comes to a kickabout in the park, to a game of five-a-side down at Powerleague. In a world of endless competition, they epitomise innocence – and innocence is a commodity that can't be bought.