Claudio Ranieri thinks Chelsea WILL finish in the top four

In-form Leicester City winger Riyad Mahrez doesn’t feel his side can win the Premier League title, despite approaching Christmas top of the pile. However since de Gea’s transfer deadline day move to Spain broke down, the Manchester United has been in the form of his life.

Simply, the solution is to put more faith in the academy schemes that top clubs like to spend so much time singing the praises of. And he’s probably right, but that says a lot about how dismal the Black Cats have been this season (and longer).

Take last Saturday’s weird incident involving Swansea City’s captain Ashley Williams and City’s Riyad Mahrez. Those three teams have 22 points and they are in ahead of Southampton with 21 points.

“We don’t want any distractions from what we are trying to do”.

And much like we’ve seen Mourinho wage media wars with the likes of Pep Guardiola, Arsene Wenger and Manuel Pellegrini, Ranieri also fell victim to a Mourinho onslaught.

After only just avoiding relegation to the Championship under Nigel Pearson last season, not many saw this outstanding form (in which they have taken a total of 32 points) coming so these claims seem a little without substance.

The only common denominator we can identify at this point are the managers: Mourinho replaced Ranieri on the Chelsea sideline in 2004.

Liverpool legend Jamie Carragher had one small reason to be happy with Newcastle’s win against his former side – with Martin Skrtel’s own goal equalling Carra’s record of seven own goals. The Europa League may be your best shot, although I think Jurgen Klopp has his eyes on that prize as well. The Blues were unbeaten in 2 consecutive Premier League games and looked good against top four favorites Spurs, but all of the promise that existed fell apart against Bournemouth this past week.

West Brom comes in with 19 points, while Chelsea has 15 points and they have been struggling for most of the year in the bottom half of the standings.

BT Sport pundit Rio Ferdinand slammed the English clubs in the Champions League as he believes that they are way behind their rivals from around Europe. They’re even now planning to increase their stadium capacity to 60,000. Arsenal and Manchester City could very well make it to the next round and all of this could be written up as a tough group stage. Despite the results and the table as-it-stands, most football pundits (professional and amateur) continue to omit Leicester from their title projections, supremely confident that they’ll fall off eventually. While the Hornets have yet to beat a truly big team, I like to think that they will manage to stay up in the Premier League and defy all expectations. They’ve also got Marko Arnautović and Xherdan Shaqiri, who can be quite deadly together when given the chance.