Are we only as interested as our last game?

There’s a sense of sombre mourning for the state of the Premier League after Chelsea’s performance against Manchester City on Sunday. In a sense, it’s warranted and you can see why people feel that way: this was a game where the champions traveled to the champions-elect, it was supposed to be a passing of the torch which should have meant Chelsea made it as difficult as possible for the pretenders to their throne. Instead, we witnessed walking football that even the pensioners trotting out for their weekly game would find limp.

“If this is the future, the Premier League has a major problem,” opined Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian, whilst Gary Neville, on Sky, suggested that even City fans will have found the game boring. Both are true statements in the context of what’s just happened, but they make me wonder if we’re simply focused on the short term.

There’s enough evidence to suggest that this is more than just a one-off. That’s undeniable. From Rafael Benitez’s Newcastle against City just after Christmas to Manchester United’s soul-destroying performance at Anfield in October, there have been plenty of performances in the same vein of Chelsea’s on Sunday.

But that’s seemingly to forget about the other top six games which have been much different to the ones we know were abject disappointments.

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Manchester City’s game against Liverpool at Anfield is the stand-out, as might have been their first game at the Etihad back in September when Sadio Mane’s red card changed the course of the game, even if City were already winning at the time. It would certainly have been a tighter game.

City’s games against their top six rivals have, in fact, been mostly good affairs. So too have games between Arsenal and Liverpool and even the Gunners and Chelsea this season. Who could forget Tottenham’s trip to Anfield just a few short weeks ago, too. There have been plenty of reasons to savour what the Premier League has served up so far this season.

There are, of course, wider questions. Just how often will we see teams park the bus and hope to come away with a 0-0 draw against a team like City given their dominance and their ruthlessness? Indeed, had Marcos Alonso scored with his last-minute strike, there might have been grounds for more teams to attempt such a tactic - stay in the game until the last minute before springing a surprise counter-attacking goal to come away with points.

Overall, the top six games in the Premier League this season have given us some crackers.

Therein, however, lies the problem: we are in danger of killing the golden goose. The Premier League’s top six games are the meat in the stew. Of all the talk about a European Super League - often raised as a spectre every few years - one of the only benefits to that sort of system is said to be the fact we’ll see the best games every weekend. The downside would be the fact that seeing it every week would make the magic fade.

And yet here we are already failing to appreciate the biggest games we already have: Man City v Chelsea may have been a disappointment, but plenty of others haven’t been.

Over the last few months, more and more people have bemoaned the fact that the top six is too far ahead of the rest of the league and that we now have two tiers of football - the moneyed sides who can play beautiful football and the have-nots who have to defend. Given the fact that we can’t even seem to forgive the odd poor game even on the back of some serious crackers, that might be the most compelling argument yet against the creation of any kind of super league.