Championship fever

Eight teams, and scarcely 10 points between them for months. While the Premiership title has long been an unchallenging two-horse race between Manchester United and Chelsea, the top of English league football’s second tier, the Championship, remains thrillingly, feverishly congested. The frantic, concertina’d eightsome are (alphabetically is safer, so regularly do the leaders change) Birmingham City, Derby County, Cardiff City, Preston North End, Southampton, Sunderland, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. One or two others jostle close behind, eager to join a late convulsion for the line. Just three promotion places: automatic for the leading two; the next four play-off to be the one to join them.

Wolves at Sunderland on Saturday, for instance, play a match fraught with significance. The extended drama looks certain to run to the very last kick on 6 May when Preston play host to Birmingham on the same day the others ring down the curtain against supposedly lesser opposition. Derby, Albion and Southampton finish the season at home to relegation strugglers Leeds United, Barnsley and Southend United, while Wolves, Sunderland and Cardiff travel to Leicester, Luton and Ipswich.

There is a romantic olde-tyme resonance about these clubs ravenous to regain pre-eminence. Derby, Wolverhampton, West Brom and Preston are venerable, hallowed names, each founder members of the original Football League in 1888, with the latter not only inaugural champions but professional trailblazers of the 19th century. Victorian schoolboys readily tripped off the nicknames: the Rams, the Wolves, the Baggies, and, of course, double-barrelled ‘Proud Preston’. Sunderland joined them in 1890 when a Wearside shipyard owner signed up his notorious ‘Team of All Talents’ (mostly from Scotland). With Aston Villa the fabled second-city firsts, modest little Small Heath FC tremulously became, simply, Birmingham in 1905, only daring to add ‘City’ after the second world war in 1945.