English Premier League Season Preview - Part 1

Fourteen days to go until the opening of the English Premier season. It promises to be an enthralling season again in Europe’s top league as the big four of Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool will once again battle it out for Premier League supremacy.

With the transfer window still four week away the prospects for many teams will rise and fall on how is added or leaves between now and then. But with the current rosters, this is how I see the battle for the Premier League going in 2008-2009.

In part one I will break down the relegation battle. In the next couple of days I will also look at the teams who will battle for Europe, the Champions League and those who are doomed to be mid-table candidates.

Relegation Candidates
I expect that the three newly promoted clubs, West Brom, Hull City and Stoke to be relegated at the end of the reason. These are probably the weakest three times that have gotten promotion in recent memory and while I don’t expect them to be as bad as Derby were last year, I cannot see them surviving.

Even through these are the weakest teams in the Premier League that does not mean that there will not be a relegation battle. I expect that the bottom six will also contain Newcastle, Bolton and Wigan.

The wheels are coming off the Kevin Keegan revolution where off-side stories threaten to derail this season. Newcastle’s weakness last year was at the back and they have not made any major improvements there and I see a lot of 3-2, 4-3 games for Newcastle this year.

I admit I was amazed that Bolton stayed up last year. Gary Megson does not impress me as a manager and he will be hoping that new signing Johan Elmander from Toulouse can replace the goals that Nicholas Anelka and El-Hadji Diouf got last year.

I feel that a great season for Bolton would be 10th position in the Premier League and I don’t think they will get that high.

Steve Bruce did a great job last year keeping Wigan up and his biggest off-season signing might be convincing Wilson Palacios to sign a new contract.

Like many of the teams in the bottom half of the table, Wigan will struggle to score goals again this season. The partnership of Marlon King and Emile Heskey will not keep many opposing managers awake at night.