Key games which lost is a CL place

It may not be the ideal moment but it’s perhaps worth recalling now the season is all over the moments when Champions League football was lost .

And we can probably identify the Christmas period as the reason why it’s the Europa League rather than the big one given that we were just two points outsude the top four at the end of the campaign.

We went into what turned out to be not quite such a festive period with high hopes after coming through a really tough run of games.

During it we had beaten Leicester away, drawn with Spurs and Man City, and beaten Fulham, Sheffield United, Villa and Leeds.

We had every righto to feel more than confident but sadly we were held to draws by Palace and Brighton and then Fulham early in February, matches from which we might have expected to take more than one point in each case.

It’s too late to cry over spilled milk but in the world of what might have beens Christmas was something of a non event all round.