Andrew Fifield On the Premiership: The Premiership is often cited as a miracle of modern marketing and, in the sense that it represents the epitome of style over substance, the accolade is surely well deserved.

Watching it, supporters must feel like modern art connoisseurs who spend aeons pondering the significance of an unfathomable exhibit only to be informed by a passing cleaner that they have been studying a fire alarm.

Fans are continually being told that the Premiership is the shimmering, luminous ideal of physical endeavour, and at the start of the season, they desperately wanted to believe it. England was a chastening place to be last summer.

The World Cup had not simply dashed home hopes of ending 40 years of non-achievement: it had exposed them as utterly delusional, a golden chance squandered by muddle-minded management and under-cooked, over-hyped players.

In the wake of that crushing disappointment, the Premiership was supposed to restore England's faith, but the more the top flight has trumpeted its own worth, the less convincing it has become.

A case in point. Last week, Sky Sports - which eagerly embraces its role as the Premiership's Pravda- threatened to implode under the weight of its own smugness as it trumpeted the achievement of clocking up 1,000 live matches since acquiring the rights to the newly-formed league in 1992. And what seismic sporting occasion marked this milestone? Tottenham Hotspur versus Blackburn Rovers, the televisual equivalent of self-immolation.

Fans of the Premiership are still burdened by the task of sifting through the dross to find the odd glittering nugget. There is little doubt that the league's current top four is as strong as any in the history of English football: Manchester United are a rhapsody in red; Chelsea a freak of nature; Liverpool a supreme piece of European engineering and Arsenal the aesthete's choice.

But beneath this coruscating quartet? Nothing, or at least nothing of note.

The rest of the top half of the table is stuffed with the willing but workmanlike Everton, Bolton, Blackburn and Portsmouth, together with the obligatory surprise package, Reading. Steve Coppell's side have been one of the year's most enjoyable sub-plots, although some of the magic dust has been blown away by the manager's dismissive attitude towards European football.

Only Spurs - spearheaded by the sublime Dimitar Berbatov - can harbour genuine hopes of gate-crashing the established elite and even these appear far-fetched: in 12 games against the top four sides this season, Martin Jol's team have won just once. When the pressure is on, Spurs tend to scramble for the emergency exit so it is no wonder Berbatov is rumoured to be eyeing his own escape route this summer.

It is no use blaming the best of the rest. David Moyes, Mark Hughes, Harry Redknapp and Sam Allardyce have every right to feel proud of their achievements with clubs who cannot expect much more than a top-seven finish. They simply do not have the resources to achieve more, especially as the financial rewards of perennial qualification for the Champions League effectively create a force-field around the current top four. Bulwarked by their bank balances, they can afford to treat the rest of the league as an irrelevance.

Besides, it is not the duty of Bolton and Portsmouth to rip up the established order: that task should be shouldered by the Premiership giants who are not so much asleep as vegetative - Aston Villa, Newcastle United and Manchester City.

It is a disgrace that these grand old clubs have spent the last nine months stumbling around in a daze, like little kids blinded by the bright lights of big school.

But what are the chances of an improvement next term? Minimal at best. Villa might benefit from a full pre-season with Martin O'Neill and Newcastle must, surely, be invigorated by the arrival of the muscular Allardyce, one of the few managers capable of shaking this troubled institution of its torpor. But it is probably expecting too much for either to mount a credible challenge to the top four.

Elsewhere, the outlook is depressingly bleak. City are set for another turbulent summer, with Stuart Pearce odds-on to lose his job and the club's best but most flawed player, Joey Barton, set to depart. And only stupendous levels of investment will allow an also-ran such as Middlesbrough or one of the newly-promoted clubs to hoist themselves above the mid-table quagmire.

So, predictions for the new campaign. Manchester United and Chelsea to once again contest the title, with London winning by a nose; Liverpool and Arsenal to squabble over third place; Sunderland to "do a Reading" and breeze into the top eight under their bearded wonder manager; and the rest to fret endlessly over whether this could be the year their luck runs out.

Here's to the new season, same as the old season.