Smells like team spirit as Eden Hazard and Chelsea earn reward

Gooners would have been better advised to park the ‘Boring boring Chelsea chants’ at the Emirates on Sunday – and not only because it might have made the watching George Graham fidget in his seat.

The bigger problem was that the gaffer in the opposing dugout was never going to take the mockery lying down and, sure enough, Jose Mourinho promptly alighted on that rawest of nerves in north London by suggesting that it must be altogether more boring to have to watch your team of supposed title contenders fail to actually win the league in 10 years. Ouch!

But, apart from the most glittering of prizes, there are other, albeit related, measures of success in the Premier League, such as the respect and admiration of one’s peers, which is why the PFA Player and Teams Of The Year always offer something more substantial to ponder than those endless if entertaining pub debates about who is supposedly better than whom.