Survival Sunday lived up to the hype

For once, the Fiver was right. The battle to avoid relegation from the Premier League is often portrayed in grand guignol terms, a hellish rollercoaster that will send one or more unlucky teams pinwheeling out into thin air as the track finally runs out. However, barring West Ham's Carlos Tevez-inspired victory at Manchester United in 2007 that sent down Sheffield United and West Brom's leap from bottom to the safety of 17th in 2005, when all three relegation spots were still to be decided, in recent years the final-day theatre has been more Much Ado About Nothing than Macbeth.

Yesterday's proceedings started off tentatively, the Soccer Sunday boys unsure how to jazz up the staid opening exchanges. Keith Southern side-footed a presentable chance wide at Old Trafford, eliciting a flutter from Paul Merson, but for the first time in the Premier League, not a single goal was scored in the opening 10 minutes of the final round of the season. As things stood, they stood pretty still.

Then the sharks began to circle. As Blackpool fell behind, murmurs of a shock began to filter out of Molineux, where Wolves had shipped two early goals against Blackburn; then Charlie Adam's free-kick to square the scores at Old Trafford shortly before half-time detonated a series of events that gave Jeff Stelling a challenge of increasingly Countdown-like proportions to deal with.

It was a frantic afternoon. Of the five teams vying to stay up, only Blackburn did not fall into the bottom three at any point. Wolves and Birmingham twice dropped into the relegation places; Blackpool briefly had their heads above the surface; Wigan spent 78 minutes submerged. These were muddy, bloody waters. "Birmingham don't know they're going down!" yelped Matt Le Tissier as the Blues defended their goal late in the game ... Only the final whistle could stop the head spinning, condemning with a shrill blast Blackpool and Birmingham to the Championship. Survival Sunday had looked the hype square in the eye and the hype blinked first.

It's a shame to see Blackpool go

A couple of stats sum up Blackpool's vibrant campaign. The Seasiders scored more goals (55) than any relegated side in the history of the Premier League – in fact, you have to go back as far as Fulham in 1967-68, in what was a 42-game season, to find a team that fell out of the top flight having scored more (56) – but they also conceded the most own goals (five) in a season of defending that was often so suicidal it would have shamed the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.

Ian Holloway's side play open, attacking football and have won many fans due to their refusal to engage in the percentage game, attempting to swashbuckle their way to safety rather than eek out survival. Part of their entertainment value was their capacity for catastrophe, and quixotic defeats such as those against Manchester United (twice), Manchester City and Everton will live in the memory as long as the dashing wins over Liverpool, Tottenham and Bolton. As David Lacey remarked in these pages, Blackpool's brief occupation of fourth in the table served as a reminder "of what can still be achieved with relatively humble means".

The last word, as ever should go to the manager, Holloway, in whose image the team is built – though rather than dwell on his understandably upset comments after the final whistle at Old Trafford, we'll revisit a passage from this interview last month:

"Football is a very small part of the universe, and Blackpool is tiny in comparison, but we are trying to make ourselves as good as we can be and are being run as sensibly as we can be run ... We are all trying our best. I've never met a manager or a player who deliberately goes out to lose or doesn't try his best. They might be on a lot of money, a ridiculously obscene amount of money, but they are still trying. It's a funny old world and I just wish everyone health and happiness, but I am not going to lose mine over a game."

For a man characterised as a bit of a joker, those are some pretty wise words. Hopefully we'll be hearing again from "Olly", and Blackpool, sooner rather than later.

Weakened teams? What weakened teams?

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ... The idea that Manchester United would send out the kids for the last game of the season always seemed likely to be a canard, even if Sir Alex Ferguson would have been completely entitled to use his 25-man squad and take his chances with the Premier League's "full-strength team" rule.

Despite much discussion on the subject of possible sanction, Ferguson never really suggested other than that United would approach the match in their usual fashion, stating:

"It gives us a real opportunity to look at how we can rest players and who needs to be kept going because maybe that was a weakness in our last European Cup final [in 2009]. We played a reserve team against Hull City. We have a responsibility to make sure we are fair to all the clubs in the country who are struggling with relegation. Manchester United as always will try to win next Sunday there is absolutely no doubt about that."

The question of whether resting his entire first team would actually have done more harm than good seems to have been at the forefront of the United manager's thinking – and given that there are six days until the Champions League final, rather than three as in 2009, so making recovery time less of a concern, the matter seemed to vex everyone other than Ferguson far more than it should have done.

By the by, we also learned that Ferguson seems to be an adherent of consequentialist rather than deontological ethics. "You should be criticised if you lose a game that affects other teams," said the United manager, suggesting that the outcome was of far more importance than the process. But that probably says as much about Fergie as you need to know – it's only the result that matters.

This has been the most entertaining Premier League season ever

Well, by one metric, anyway. With 32 goals scored on the final day, the tally swelled to a José Mourinho-offending 1063 for the 2010-11 season, the highest since the Premier League was reduced to 20 teams in 1995-96. We've also had one of the most enthralling fights to stay up in a good long while; dazzling bursts of unexpected excellence from the likes of Bolton (who incredibly finished 14th, having been in the top half for all but four weeks of the season), Sunderland and West Brom; a muscular and menacing Manchester City at last punching somewhere near their financial weight; the oscillating fortunes of Liverpool and Chelsea. Truly we live in interesting times (though Carlo Ancelotti might not see it that way).

That said, it's a familiar sight at the top of the pile, the title race was more of a hobble and you could probably have pinned on the top seven in roughly the same order at the start of the season (don't go back and check to see if we did, however much you want to). As Mourinho knew, quantity is not the same as quality – and it is a truth universally acknowledged that standards have slipped. Whatever the case, it's time for a well-earned rest. With a summer largely free of competitive football there will be plenty of opportunity to digest ...

Kevin Davies: always razing the bar

In among all the end-of-season babble, an interesting tweet sprang forth from the Opta Joe Twitter account. Kevin Davies's barge on Joleon Lescott after 15 minutes of Bolton's game against Manchester City saw him register his 121st foul of the season – the most since Opta began counting such things in the 1990s. What does this tell us? That the best can always get better. See you in August.