Palmer risks being trapped outside elite - Why his Stamford days may be numbered

It's a big week for Ange Postecoglou and Ruben Amorim. Champions League or bust would be the best way to sum it up ahead of next Wednesday’s Europa League final in Bilbao.

But the managers of Tottenham and Manchester United – clubs with 37 Premier League defeats between them ahead of Friday night’s games – are not the only ones with much to gain and lose by the fall of the footballing dice this coming week.

What of Cole Palmer?

If things don’t go well for Chelsea when they play United at Stamford Bridge on Friday and then face Nottingham Forest for what could yet be a top five shootout at the City Ground a week on Sunday, a third season without Champions League football will beckon for the 23-year-old.

Is that what he left Manchester City for? To be the leading light on the Thursday night undercard? Palmer is one of England’s most talented footballers. A transformative and generational star in the making who may turn out to be more central to Thomas Tuchel’s World Cup hopes even than Jude Bellingham.

His road to prominence has been travelled incredibly quickly since he moved south from the Etihad Stadium at the start of last season. But Palmer has started just one Champions League game in his career, for City against Sevilla back in November 2022. If things don’t go Chelsea’s way over the next nine days that strange and potentially damaging pause in his life will go on.

For the last two seasons – as Palmer lit up the Premier League before a recent drop in form – the debate about the Mancunian has been framed only one way and it revolved around the wisdom or otherwise of Pep Guardiola’s decision to let him go.

But now we can look at it differently. It’s a debate with layers all of a sudden. City are not the City they were last season but this weekend they may well win the FA Cup. Moreover, Guardiola’s team are in the middle of a sudden and urgent creative rebuild.

Kevin De Bruyne is moving on and may well be followed by Jack Grealish. Bernardo Silva and Ilkay Gundogan are not the players they were. Even Phil Foden has struggled.

Almost overnight, creative voids have opened up in this City team. A road blocked for so long is now open. Had Palmer hung around a while longer, he would not only have been in Guardiola’s team, the great City coach would have been building it around him this summer. Now there’s a thought.

Palmer never strikes me as a player who dwells on things. It’s part of his beauty. His football is instinctive and natural. It’s part of what makes him so mesmerising to watch.

Nevertheless, his drop-off in form since the turn of the year has been startling. His penalty against Liverpool two weeks ago was his first Chelsea goal since January.

And maybe we should not be surprised. It doesn’t feel coincidental. Palmer had been carrying Enzo Maresca’s team for long enough, just like he had carried the Mauricio Pochettino version to a sixth-placed Premier League finish the year before.

That kind of thing takes a toll on a player, particularly when they are playing such a weight of games for the first time in a career. If Palmer has been exhausted by his single-handed efforts to drag Chelsea back to real relevance then we can’t really blame him.

He was boyish and coltish when he arrived in London. Not callow, but inexperienced. By now he will know exactly what Chelsea is – a football club where the ground is constantly moving beneath your feet, a place where nothing can be considered certain and where the potential for chaos always seems to lurk in the shadows.

The considered wisdom currently is that Maresca will stay at the club whatever happens over the coming days. Chelsea are in the Europa Conference League final too, if that kind of thing turns a big club on.

Nevertheless, churn never feels far away at the Bridge. Will Palmer play for the same manager next season? Maybe. Will he look up on day one next August and see the same attacking team-mates dressed in blue? That’s more unlikely.

In this environment, he is expected to grow and that is an enduring problem for players at Chelsea. All footballers benefit from stability and a feeling of clear direction. Palmer must exist without that and as such he can only hope that this campaign ends with Chelsea in the top five.

A £100million Champions League pot along with the cache the competition brings when trying to attract new players would give Chelsea the fillip the club needs so badly. It could shoot them forwards. They really should beat a United team with other things on their mind and if they do, they will begin to feel as though they have a foot firmly in the door.

But last weekend’s defeat at Newcastle was limp. If it does come down to a do-or-die game at Forest next weekend, I wouldn’t lay an awful lot of money on blue.

And if they were not to make it, then what next? Is Palmer really going to be expected to drag Chelsea through the slurry pit of Thursday night football next term while six other English teams – almost one third of the Premier League – bathe on the sunny uplands of the only European competition that really matters?

For a while maybe. But surely not for long.

The big shock in my team of the season

Along with my podcast co-host Chris Sutton, I have slowly been putting together my team of the season in the Premier League and here it is.

Sels (Nottingham Forest); Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool), Van Dijk (Liverpool), Milenkovic (Forest), Ait-Nouri (Wolves); Rice (Arsenal); Szoboszlai (Liverpool), Rogers (Aston Villa); Fernandes (Man Utd); Salah (Liverpool), Isak (Newcastle).

There is room for debate right through that team – particularly at left back and in goal – and I am sure you won’t be shy.

One thing struck me as I typed it out, though. A team of the year without a Manchester City player. What an extraordinary season it’s been.

Farewell, Goodison

I used to go to Goodison Park reasonably often with my father when I was younger. Everton are not my team but it didn’t matter. It was 35 minutes from our front door.

I saw the great Howard Kendall team dismantle Sunderland 4-1 on that incredible afternoon in 1985. I saw Jim Beglin break his leg on a misty night in winter two years later and Efan Ekoku score four for Norwich in 1993 with a lad called Sutton grabbing one too.

But when I think of Goodison I will always think of day when a break in play during a game against QPR that same season prompted the great Ray Wilkins to amble over, sit on the hoarding with his leg up and fall into conversation with the front few rows of the lower Bullens Road Stand.

Reports say he also signed an autograph while waiting to take a corner. Knowing the late Wilkins, he probably could have done both at the same time.

It is strange the things we remember isn’t it? I wish all at Goodison on Sunday an afternoon to remember.

It was inevitable, Harry

Harry Kane is a Bundesliga champion and we are pleased for our England captain.

But his first season at the club last year was the first time they hadn’t won it since 2012.

So, well, you know… it was coming, wasn’t it?