Football Daily | Hope, torment and joy

First up, an apology to Arsenal fans and any others desperately wishing for a final-day Premier League upset. We just can’t see it happening. We’ve crunched the numbers, weighed up the matchups, scoured the history books for precedent – right from when football began 32 years ago – and can’t find any legitimate reasons to suggest Manchester City won’t claim a fourth consecutive league title this weekend. Their relentlessness over the last two months has been somewhat of a kill-joy to what, for a while, seemed to be a genuinely compelling conclusion. They’ve won eight league games on the bounce. They haven’t lost since early December. They are, once more, annoyingly great.