Barney Ronay

So any league, it's a feature of any league, they come at the end of the season, the incentives for different teams will be different.

And the league only functions, it only has integrity, if everybody is still at least making some sort of effort to win the game or to get the result that they need out of the game.

Bournemouth...

Thanks to ludicrous regulations, but Bournemouth needed City to win that game to have a chance of getting into the Champions League.

If City and Villa are messing about having guards of honour in the middle of a game, and when this happened with John Terry in the Chelsea-Sunderland game years ago, I felt exactly the same.

By definition, they're not taking the game as seriously as they ought to.

And I think it's really contemptuous of City and to a lesser extent Villa of teams below them in the table who require them to play that game seriously.

One of the problems when leagues began 150 years ago was getting towards the end of the season, teams had nothing to play for, just literally wouldn't turn up for games.

So you look at tables...

from happily our league seems to have got away with this.

But look at tables in the late 19th century and often you'll have the top three or four teams will have played 30 games and then teams are 27, 24, 22 because they couldn't be bothered.

This is essentially the same thing and it's outrageous.

You've got to play properly or the league falls apart.

Yeah, I mean, it is the end of an era.

That Liverpool team, the Klopp team that won the league, that won the Champions League, it is now definitively over.

And that's been a process that's probably gone for, what, two, three years?

It began under Klopp that...

He made a series of changes and obviously Klopp goes.

Salah has clearly been one of the greatest players in the Premier League.

It's probably the right time for him to go because he has been nowhere near that level this season.