Leading article: Football crazy

Football can have a cruel sense of humour sometimes. Having comfortably outperformed Arsenal, their bitter north London rivals, since last summer, Tottenham Hotspur were yesterday beaten to fourth spot in the Premier League on the very last day of the season by ... Arsenal.

That was only the beginning of the day's ironies. The difference between fourth and fifth spot is qualification for the elite Champions' League European tournament. Spurs will now lose out on millions in television revenues and will play in the little-watched UEFA cup instead. Even if Arsenal had lost yesterday, they could still have taken Tottenham's qualifying place by winning this year's Champions' League final against Barcelona. Plus, Arsenal were also playing their last game at their Highbury stadium and so had an added incentive to go out on a high.

When one considers, on top of all this, that 10 Spurs players came down with food poisoning in the team hotel on the night before the game, it is almost impossible not to feel a little sorry for Tottenham. Of all the days to be struck down by a dodgy prawn sandwich, this surely takes some beating.

But there are bigger questions here. Why does the battle for fourth place seem to deliver more drama than the battle for the Premiership title itself these days? Last year there was a similar titanic struggle between local rivals Liverpool and Everton for the fourth spot.

Also why do we insist on watching a sport that results in such agonies (see Rooney's fourth metarsal) for the viewer? And most importantly of all: when does the new season start?