Title for Cardiff but nothing else decided

Hull would have been within a point of a Premier League return had they beaten bottom club Bristol City on Friday but had to settle for just a point and that still leaves the door open for Watford, the Italian franchise in Hertfordshire.

In beating Blackburn they went within four points but they will probably need to win their last two games to have a chance of taking that second place.

Brighton are all but in the play offs with either Hull or Watford and the other two places will go to two from Crystal Palace and Bolton, currently in the top six, and Leicester and Nottingham Forest who are just outside.

Two of those clubs, Crystal Palace and Leicester, fought out a 2-2 draw yesterday and that would have been enough to see both in the top six but for the intervention of referee Darren Deadman in the game between Bolton and Middlesbrough.

The game stood at 1-1 when this appalling referee handed the points to Bolton with the most ridiculous of penalty awards. He compounded it by yellow carding Jonathan Woodgate and then sending him off for a second yellow minutes later.

Middlesbrough boss Tony Mowbray said after the game: "I thought we deserved more than that and we needed a better official to referee the game because there were some bewildering decisions out there today. The penalty was one of them and the sending off was certainly one of them.

"I thought we were the better team but the history books will show that we lost. They won't show that we conceded a lucky goal and then a penalty, which having seen half a dozen times was never a penalty kick, but that sums up the referee's performance."

Despite a disastrous run, Middlesbrough are mathematically safe on 58 points. Ipswich, one point behind, would have to suffer some seriously big defeats if they were to go down, but below that it is still possible for any of the other eight clubs to be in the two to join Bristol City.

I'm not even going to hazard a guess who it might be other than to say I'm relieved to be one of the four clubs on 55 points right now than one of the three on 51 points.

It's going to be a very interesting last two weeks of the season. One way or another we will drop a place on Tuesday when Millwall and Blackburn meet, but hopefully in two weeks time there will be a huge sigh of relief in Burnley.

Let's just hope we don't get Deadman. We've had him once before at Wolves and he cost us the game that day. Some poor club will likely suffer the country's worst referee this coming weekend.

The latest results and stats are below along with the week's Championship fixtures.