EPL crisis index: Who’s teetering above the abyss of misery after Week 6?

Now that we’re into the 25th season of the Premier League, it’s time to face up to its impact. Not only has it changed football — for good and ill — but it’s altered the very language we use. The word “crisis” used to be reserved for extreme circumstances; now, it is a permanent presence in the game.

The CRISIS is its own power. It is always with us. All we have to do is work out where it should be allocated this week …

Because they won! But still, they deserve a mention. For there is no other team in the Premier League — in Britain? in the world? — so charged with potential CRISIS. They swell like a storm cloud. They rumble along like a river after the snows have melted. They wobble, like Mr. Creosote, on the edge of explosion.

The defence gets much of the blame for this, and rightly so, but in truth the whole team contributes. Up front, they miss the easy chances then take the hard ones; on the break, they slice teams up or trip themselves over; in midfield, they swarm one moment and fizzle out the next. Their heads and their spirits go up and down, up and down, and their performances swing from brilliant to baffling. Often within the same minute.

So yes, this week Simon Mignolet was just about able to quieten the angry skies, quell the torrent, and repel Jamie Vardy’s wafer-thin penalty. But CRISIS, with this defence and this manager and this football and this club, is only ever deferred. This is a club that is constantly squeaking at the seams. Which must be very strange and rather exhausting for anybody that supports Liverpool, just as it’s deeply entertaining for anybody that doesn’t.

We were tempted to give Palace a pass. After all, they’ve already been through the CRISIS, sacked their manager, and are now theoretically out the other side. Sure, they don’t have any points yet. Or indeed any league goals. But they’ve got a new manager, and everybody deserves a bit of time to get used to things. Even Roy “Captain Funtime” Hodgson.

But then we got the news that Christian Benteke will be out for anywhere between four and eight weeks with a knee injury. Luckily for Palace, a couple of weeks of that will be eaten up by the international break. But still, he’s likely to miss at least three league games, and it could easily be twice as many.

Will Palace have scored a goal by the time he returns? Will they have picked up a point? For an answer to this question, we turn to their squad list, to find out which strikers will be picking up the slack in Benteke’s absence.

Connor Wickham. That appears to be it. He’s injured! Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

There was a moment in West Ham’s loss to Tottenham where the CRISIS stopped hovering over the London Stadium as a whole, and narrowed its focus to just Slaven Bilić, like one of those small black stormclouds from a Daffy Duck cartoon. That was the moment Michail Antonio’s groin went TWAAAAAANG and Bilić, having considered his options, decided to chuck Andy Carroll into the fray. Forget the plan, get the big man on.

Immediately, West Ham disintegrated; immediately, the game went from a close contest into a Tottenham stroll. And while Spurs’ own neuroses delivered an entertaining finish and a vaguely respectable scoreline — and may have kept Bilić in a job for the moment — the fact remains. He had it, and he botched it, and now CRISIS is raining all over his face.