Let me first apologise if this week’s bulletin seems a little downbeat, but we are heading towards one of the most anti-climactic ends to a season that I can remember. So anti-climactic in fact that we have all been brainwashed in recent weeks into buying into the apparent excitement and drama of the contest to see who will finish fourth in the Premier League. Not first or last, but fourth. With the relegation places having been decided long ago, and any drama regarding the Premier League title having been dissipated by the fixture list that (somewhat conveniently for the managers of the top sides who would have had plenty to say otherwise) provided Man.U., Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool and Spurs with notably straightforward closing matches, we’ve had to look towards the relegation battle in the Championship and the promotion race from League One for any real excitement at all. With the actions of a number of morons at Hillsborough and Kenilworth Road having put fans’ behaviour at potential tinderbox games back

Well, I suppose we were due a slice of bad luck, but it’s still hard to take when four of your five accumulator teams have already won and the final selection are ahead in the fourth minute of injury time only for Jon Walters of Ipswich to pop up with an equaliser and deny us a 7/1+ payout. The fact that I know he has to put up with Roy Keane at training every day is some sort of comfort to me, but he still has much to answer for as I look to build up my battle funds for the World Cup. By the way, if anybody knows where I can get a dartboard sized picture of Jon Walters, please let me know.

I’d like to take this opportunity to heartily congratulate Newcastle for their straightforward win at Plymouth on Monday night, not because it clinched the Championship title for them, but because it rounded off yet another winning accumulator for us following Reading and Leyton Orient’s convincing wins at the weekend. I should also point out that if you had placed a tenner on each of the three matches for which I suggested backing “no goalscorer” last week, you would have received a further return of £95, so it was a lucrative weekend all round. I’m going for a bigger one this week as it has been very difficult to narrow down the selections from a number of likely looking sides on this weekend’s coupon, but first, let’s have a look at the next batch of Premier League fixtures:

I suppose many people will see last weekend as the time that much of the excitement and intrigue was removed from the major end of season battles. Man.United’s failure to win at Blackburn put Chelsea firmly in the driving seat for the title, the results at West Ham and Hull look to have confirmed that the current bottom three will remain the bottom three, the two automatic promotion spots from the Championship have already been decided, and Chelsea will surely regain the FA Cup now that their customary whipping boys in Portsmouth have been confirmed as their opposition on May 15. I’m not sure I share in all the “fairytale” nonsense we are having to put up with over Portsmouth’s FA Cup semi-final win over Spurs as they are a club who seem to have reaped many rewards from purposely living way beyond their means without suffering the sort of consequences that any normal business or even a club in a lower division would, as Luton fans will testify having seen their club hounded down through the divisions and even

Last weekend’s suggested treble turned into a nice Easter bonus for those of you who backed it, and we were indebted to the much-travelled Ritchie Foran, whose last minute winner for Inverness Caledonian Thistle brought home the bacon. I’ve selected another potentially lucrative set of matches for you for this coming weekend, but in the meantime, I have been left with just six Premier League fixtures to preview due to the FA Cup semi-finals, but amongst them are a couple of intriguing battles at the bottom of the table which should make for a fascinating Saturday afternoon’s entertainment: