It’s a fine day to be a voyeuristic neutral. English football’s least restful sabbath promises wonderful entertainment for all who don’t have to dread being left feeling that the action should have ended not with a quick blast on a referee’s whistle but the slow tolling of a bell. By the time Manchester United or Chelsea are crowned champions and two other clubs have been bundled along with Derby into the Premier League’s disposal chute, there will be supporters convinced that, compared with them, the Lord’s Day Observance Society have had a good afternoon.

Any inclination to remind such sufferers that it’s only a game would be best indulged while revving up a fast motorbike. Professional football’s capacity to engage the emotions of millions in this country to an extraordinary depth has readily withstood the distortions and depredations visited on the core attractions of the sport by the relentlessly financial priorities of the modern era. In its upper echelons arrogantly mercenary attitudes, collective and individual, may often prevail to an extent suggesting institutionalised greed, and a sense of disenchantment can infiltrate the staunchest devotion.

But for a multitude of us the basic appeal of football, of the playing and spectating pleasures that have made it unchallengeably the most popular team game ever devised, remains more than strong enough to survive the vandalising effects of the money-driven culture now enveloping its values. On a day like this, though we can’t forget the ills, we can happily embrace the thrills. A suspicion that somewhere up ahead the bullion train will hit the buffers needn’t stop us from relishing a Sunday ride of raw excitement.

The rawness will be close to unbearable for Sir Alex Ferguson if his United players fail at Wigan to take the three points that will ensure the 10th Premier League title of his Old Trafford reign. Ferguson is right in claiming that should both his team and Chelsea (whose prodigious home record indicates they are barely at risk against Bolton) be winners today, a triumph on the basis of goal difference will justify undiluted pride and satisfaction. Such circumstances would amount to a photo-finish, but not the kind to strain the judge’s eyes. United head into today’s decisive hour and a half having scored 14 league goals more than Chelsea and conceded three fewer.

These figures don’t merely assure the defending champions of a vast cushion of superiority in the event of finishing level on points with the title-holders of 2005 and 2006. The statistics also accurately represent the commitment to adventurous aggression, to attacking methods as crowd-pleasing as they are productive, that is habitual for Ferguson and has this season produced a goals aggregate overwhelmingly more impressive than the totals of any competitors in the Premier League other than Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal (73). Chelsea have so far scored fewer goals (64) than either Aston Villa (69) or Tottenham Hotspur (66), though Villa are 25 points beneath Chelsea in the table and Spurs are 38 points adrift of them.

Of course, we all know which column reflects overall effectiveness, but isn’t there special merit in going for the best of both worlds? That’s what United have done, gathering the points to give them the favourite’s role in the imminent showdown while being deadlier at the front and more resistant at the back than all of their rivals. They bring a gunfighter’s boldness to their pursuit of the big prize and anybody who doesn’t think they would be deserving champions of 2008 must be working with peculiar criteria.

None of that diminishes the credit due to Chelsea and their manager, Avram Grant, for keeping their challenge for the title vibrantly alive into the last day of competition. Benefiting from increasingly significant contributions by a rejuvenated Michael Bal-lack and the reassertion of a vital influence on performances by Frank Lamp-ard, theirs has been the most consistently dominant form of any English team in recent weeks. If, as expected, they lose out this afternoon they will be optimistic about taking revenge on United in the Champions League final in Moscow on May 21. Thoughts of the Luzhniki stadium seem likely to sway some journalistic allegiances around 3pm today. Unlikely rooters for Ferguson may emerge, if only because quite a few of my fellow scribblers, having until lately shown a persistent, merciless eagerness to dismiss Grant as a doltish insult to the job he holds, might be more than mildly discomfited if he found himself travelling to Russia with the prospect of completing a Premier League-Champions League double.

Obviously his critics would still have the option of insisting that Chelsea’s success had come in spite of Grant’s mismanagement, perhaps that it was attributable to the self-organising, self-motivating powers of the players, aided by shrewd guidance from elsewhere in the off-field staff. But such convoluted explanations are generally fanciful and almost always unfair.

Grant may not be an inspired manager but, as was argued in this space a couple of months ago, he appears to be doing a decent job. And the man who takes the pain should share the gain.

Avoiding devastating loss will be the concern of Birmingham, Fulham and Reading on their desperate Sunday, and guessing which one of them will escape relegation would be an intrusion on private grief. No, I won’t be telling the doomed it’s only a game - not even if offered a pillion seat on a warmed-up Harley.

Triple Crown has true mixture of agony and ecstasy

Competing currents of anticipation and anxiety run through American horse racing’s preparations for the second of its Triple Crown classics, the Preakness Stakes at the Pimlico track in Maryland on Saturday. Nervous ambivalence about the Baltimore race has been made inevitable by the disorienting mixture of exhilaration and heartbreak experienced in last weekend’s Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, where awestruck acclaim for the magnificent performance of the winner, Big Brown, was swiftly muffled as it became known that the brilliant filly who finished 4¾ lengths behind him in second place (and ahead of 18 other colts) was dead. Eight Belles had been put out of her misery after suffering fractures to both front ankles when pulling up. Even as witnessed by this television viewer in a New York hotel room, the scenes in Louisville were profoundly distressing and it was no shock that a wave of protest over the alleged cruelties of thoroughbred racing swept the US, with the more militant animal rights organisations demanding the abolition of the sport.

Fatal injuries on the Flat, particularly on dirt surfaces, are admitted to occur with unacceptable frequency in America and the present controversy will be fuelled by memories of how breaking a hind leg in the 2006 Preakness eventually led to the euthanisation of that year’s impressive Kentucky Derby winner, Barbaro, in January 2007. Rick Dutrow Jr, the trainer of Big Brown, goes to Baltimore with worries about both the closeness to one another of the Triple Crown races and the surface at Pimlico. It has, he says, always been too hard for the horses “and the harder the track, the more unsafe it is”. Since the main reason that Big Brown’s exposure to racing has so far been limited to four outings is thought to be foot trouble (notably a susceptibility to quarter cracks on his front feet), Dutrow’s concern is understandable.

But, on the general issue of racing dangers, he could be expected to echo most of the points made in the New York Times by the successful breeder Jim Squires: “Horses, especially thoroughbreds are constantly at risk . . . Watching a herd of yearlings racing recklessly across your pasture bucking and kicking at one another is not unlike watching your teenager leave in a car driven by a 16-year-old with a lead foot and the attention span of a flashbulb . . . Horses who never saw a racetrack in their lives founder regularly from mysterious causes and end up like Barbaro.” However, Squires was keen to argue that much could be done to reduce the incidence of catastrophic injuries in competition. He acknowledged that improving the breed, reversing the trend towards producing animals less sound than former generations were, would be immensely difficult but was more sanguine about the benefits to be gained in the US from improving the safety of tracks, curtailing the racing programmes of immature horses, and ensuring medications that mask injuries and weaknesses are controlled strictly and uniformly in all Turf jurisdictions. Also, more radically, he denounced the use of force to put horses into stalls and whipping them to make them run.

Squires was unmistakably testifying as a true horse-lover and we can be sure he will be as excited as the rest of the worldwide fraternity by the promise of greatness discernible in Big Brown, who has won his four races by an aggregate distance of nearly 34 lengths. Already there is belief he can be the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978. Some are even asking if Big Brown might ultimately be comparable to Big Red. But that is probably going too far. Big Red was the nickname of Secretariat, the imperious chestnut champion of 1973 who was the greatest of all American racehorses.