Dave Tickner looks back on the first half of a Premier League season that has seen a return to predictability but retained last year's weirdness.
Those who hoped last season might herald an extended period of gloriously weird Premier League unpredictability have been sadly and swiftly disappointed.
But not entirely. This season has almost completely shed the unpredictability that made 2015/16 so glorious, but it has retained much of the weirdness.
Chelsea and Liverpool have put the shambolic efforts of last season behind them, and even Manchester United now seem to have stumbled upon a successful formula under grumpmeister-in-chief Jose Mourinho.
Spurs and Arsenal, meanwhile, are being Spurs and Arsenal, while Pep Guardiola is finding it slightly harder to impose his footballing philosophy on defenders who aren't already among the world's best. At the moment, Pep Guardiola appears to be a very good __football manager, an outcome that satisfies neither those who hail him as a coaching messiah nor those who dismiss him as an absolute fraud and a charlatan. Sadly for everyone, there is no room for any opinion on Pep between these two, and so on rumble the endless arguments about Guardiola's godlike/fraudulent stature. Leicester, meanwhile, have reserved almost all their insanity for the Champions League while bedding down for a winter spent staving off the threat of relegation back home
The upshot is that in the Best League In The World where Anybody Can Beat Anybody, the 'big six' have lost a combined total of 17 games before Christmas, and only five of those defeats in games not played amongst themselves. And even of those five, two came from Liverpool mucking about and one was Manchester City losing to the defending champions.
Chelsea are on course for the title, Liverpool are on course to fall entertainingly short, Arsenal are fourth and one point ahead of Tottenham and the Manchester clubs are there or thereabouts. That's pretty much the blueprint for the last decade of Premier League football.
But, still, it has been weird. And a lot of that weirdness has centred on north London. Arsenal, for their part, are currently wondering whether November has come late or if February has come early as their season threatens to unravel on the back of two defeats that, in isolation and without Arsenal's history, would not be too alarming but, given their timing and the alarming way the Gunners twice capitulated from a goal to the good, feel ominous and full of foreboding.
Arsenal fans are well used to it by now, of course, but the cruellest trick was that this year they really looked like they might have cracked it, that they might be more like Arsene Wenger's steely, early sides who combined flair and technique with spirit and strength. More than once they had scrambled scarcely-deserved victories in the dying moments of matches when playing poorly, and when they played well they were close to unstoppable. They hadn't lost a Premier League game since the opening day and had for once topped their Champions League group.
Everything looked rosy. Then they drew Bayern Munich in the Champions League anyway and lost at a previously anaemic Everton before casually tossing away their first-half advantage against Manchester City. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
But by far the weirdest season among the big six is unfolding down the road at White Hart Lane, where a team that played joyfully effective __football (for 90 per cent of) last season is this season playing joylessly effective football despite boasting largely the same squad.
They still concede very few goals despite always looking capable of conceding very silly ones - something they have actually managed to do against both Manchester United and Burnley recently - but the fun has all gone.
Spurs have played genuinely well for a combined total of maybe five hours this season. Ninety minutes against Manchester City, the last hour at Stoke, the first 45 minutes at Middlesbrough, plus perhaps a combined 90 minutes in the routine swattings of dreadfully poor Swansea and Hull sides, and the last five insane minutes of a cracking London derby against West Ham.
Yet despite being almost heroically mediocre and more often than not quite startlingly dull, here they sit at Christmas on 33 points from 17 games and a mere point off the top four. For all their struggles their only defeats have been single-goal setbacks at Chelsea and Manchester United. And they've qualified for a dream Europa League last-32 clash with Gent - nice location, short trip, ropey opposition.
And all this (apart from the European bit) has been happening under the ever-growing shadow of the shiny new stadium that can propel the club to a new level. The only way, surely, is up.
But for some reason it just doesn't feel that way. Weird.