Making sense of fixture schedule

A certain pressure lifted, for sure, but might it just have felt a hint of loneliness this morning, our old friend The Fixtures Computer, as it prepared to spit out the first Premier League schedule of the post-Fergie era? Nobody took greater interest in its work than Fergie. Nobody was better able to detect malice in its algorithms or parse a conspiracy out of its sequences.

So intrigued was Fergie with information technology’s approach to filling a calendar that, a few years back, he decided to do a man-marking job on it.

“I’m not saying what they do down there, but next year we will be sending somebody to see how it happens, I can assure you. I just don’t understand how you can get the fixtures like that.”