Arsenal
It can often feel a little uncomfortable to praise a team in defeat. It either comes across as patronising (in the case of lesser clubs) or too generous in the case of bigger teams. Ultimately, league positions are decided by the number of points you win. On Saturday, Arsenal won none.
But it surely isn’t inappropriate to praise Arsenal here. During the first half at the Emirates, they made life harder for Manchester City than any team has in a long time. Clubs that take league points off City typically rely upon profligacy from their opponents before hitting them on the break; this was different. Arsenal missed the biggest chance of the match and penned City in their own half. They were fortunate that City had played on the night of December 29 and they hadn’t played since Boxing Day, but they maximised that advantage before the break.
There was a period of six or seven minutes in the first half where Arsenal offered a perfect showcase of how to counteract City’s strengths. Firstly they pressed relentlessly, but never haphazardly and never when they were less likely to win the ball than to be bypassed by several quick passes. They looked to expose Joao Cancelo’s forward runs by using diagonal balls into space, where Gabriel Martinelli could run. On the other flank, Bukayo Saka constantly drifted into pockets of space to pull defenders out of position. For the neutral, it was brilliant to watch.
Ultimately, Arsenal were let down by individual mistakes. Supporters will look to blame the referee, but even if you think the Martin Odegaard incident was a penalty (and I’m not convinced at all), Arsenal established a lead and thus a commanding position after that. They had a chance to try and control the game and let it slip with three stupid mistakes. Granit Xhaka might have got away with the trip but didn’t escape censure for his blatant shirt pull. Gabriel’s decision to scuff up the penalty spot and then commit a second yellow-card offence minutes later was indicative of a player who had lost his head.
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But we will end with more positivity. Saka is flourishing and Arsenal deserve great credit for that, given how last summer ended for him. Kieran Tierney is back in the team and that should be a permanent move. Gabriel Martinelli is one of the most exciting youngsters in the division. The latest captaincy saga has been swatted away with minimum fuss and Arsenal look better without Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in the team. No points on Saturday, but at least it looks like there’s a point to all this.
Aston Villa
Perhaps the theme of this Premier League season is managers enjoying honeymoon periods at their new clubs before falling back down to earth with a bump:
- Dean Smith – Unbeaten in his first three games as Norwich manager and has since lost five in a row without scoring.
- Claudio Ranieri – Won two of his first five games (against Everton and Manchester United) and has since lost six in a row.
- Eddie Howe – Lost one of his first four matches and has since taken one point from four games.
And now Steven Gerrard, who won three of his first four games as Aston Villa manager to raise discussion of him taking over at Liverpool but has since taken three points from a possible 12 (and they were against Norwich City). After the initial hoopla, we get to see what Gerrard is really made of under little obvious pressure of calamity. He should use the rest of this season to formulate his plans for next.
Brentford
Comeback victories are a strong theme of Thomas Frank’s tenure as Brentford manager. During their promotion season, Brentford took 1.44 points per game from league games in which they conceded the first goal; no other team in the Championship managed more than 1.15.
This season, Brentford have continued that theme. They have taken almost 40 per cent of their points from matches in which they have trailed. Seven of those points have come in their last five matches, suggesting that a difficult period of results has done nothing to dampen the spirit in Frank’s squad.
Brighton
So often when we talk of Brighton’s excellent recruitment model, aiming to buy young potential at mid-range prices, we talk of the future. The danger of buying for tomorrow is that you can risk forgetting about today. Your squad contains seven or eight players who will peak in three years’ time but not now, which can frustrate supporters.
But the best bit of that model, the stuff that really convinces supporters that it’s all worth it, is when you witness one of those players become a star. It’s happened with Yves Bissouma, Tariq Lamptey, it’s happening right now with Enoch Mwepu and Marc Cucurella and it might be about to happen with Alexis Mac Allister
Mac Allister has been around a while. At 23 he already had senior Argentina caps and has played more than 150 career matches. But Sunday was only his 22nd Premier League start over three seasons and Brighton fans have been waiting to see him hold down a regular place in Graham Potter’s side. Scoring two brilliant goals to give your side a first away win since September will help.
More generally, well done to Potter for getting Brighton on track after some nonsense criticism, including from a section of his own season-ticket holders. The win at Everton takes them to eighth in the Premier League, eight points off the top four with a game in hand. A reminder: Brighton have never finished higher than 13th in the top flight in their history.
Burnley
It’s officially time to worry about Burnley now. Maxwel Cornet continues to do all he can, scoring 38 per cent of their league goals this season, but he cannot do it by himself. Sean Dyche’s side are struggling to defend, concerningly limp in attack and on Sunday lost to one of the few teams that can realistically hope to drag into trouble. Leeds scored three times and their dominance merited at least one more goal.
We have all been burned by writing off Burnley before; Dyche delights in proving people wrong. But they have played 17 league matches this season and won only once. They have played the current bottom two – Newcastle and Norwich – and failed to score in either game. They have won five league games since the end of January 2021. While Newcastle will probably spend freely in January, can the same really be said for Burnley?
And there is little evidence to suggest their form will improve. Burnley face Leicester, Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool over the next six weeks, and Cornet may be at Afcon for all of those four games. It’s time for Dyche to go cap in hand to Alan Pace and demand that he spends to try and save this miserable season.
Chelsea
Perhaps Romelu Lukaku had the right idea all along. What better way to enjoy your Sunday afternoon than by watching Chelsea and Liverpool from the comfort of your own sofa. Had Lukaku been on the pitch, he would have missed the chance to rewind Mateo Kovacic’s volley back and rewatch it three or four times to work out how you get that power and placement without your foot being planted.
The build-up to the fixture was dominated by Lukaku’s absence, placed on the naughty step after he gave an unauthorised interview about his struggles to fit into Thomas Tuchel’s system. Honesty over politeness, so the saying goes. Tuchel may vehemently disagree and Chelsea’s supporters back him. This was a foolish PR misstep.
Without Lukaku, Tuchel asked Kai Havertz to play as a false nine, drifting deep and wide to allow Mason Mount and Christian Pulisic to fill the space. It’s a system that Tuchel has tried repeatedly this season to cover for the absence of Lukaku and Timo Werner, only ever to partial success. Havertz tends to drift out of games and is a little too easy to dispossess.
But if Chelsea’s first goal was a piece of sensational individual brilliance from Kovacic, Tuchel’s plan did work for the second. With Liverpool still rocking, Pulisic got beyond Havertz and retained the composure he ceded when trying to round Caiomhin Kelleher when the game was scoreless.
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Far more important than the attacking strategy was Chelsea’s intensity, so obviously lacking in recent matches against Wolves and Brighton. With reports suggesting that most of Chelsea’s players were on board with his decision to omit Lukaku from the matchday squad, Tuchel will have insisted that they start quickly and allay any suspicion of crisis. It lasted from minute one to 90.
That is what was most impressive after Liverpool’s two departing forwards had given them what appeared to be a comfortable lead. Stamford Bridge never once groaned or moaned or lost faith. They roared for every decision, urged their team to up the speed of their play with and without the ball and audibly gasped at the game-changing goal.
Tuchel is typically a calm, reserved man. He spoke last May of using meditation to relax before big matches to ease any nerves. If he is manic, how can he ask his players to remain composed? But after Pulisic lobbed Kelleher shortly before half-time, Tuchel ran onto the pitch to celebrate. He raised his fist towards Stamford Bridge’s East Stand and screamed with joy. This has been a difficult week. Tuchel will feel that he deserved its happy ending.
Crystal Palace
Sorry, but I was always going to find a place to talk about referees after a weekend during which it felt like we hit a new peak of outrage. I know few people want to hear this and fewer still believe it justifies any sympathy for officials, but we are going to run out of them soon. There is a chronic shortage at grassroots level and that has to have a knock-on effect.
At both half-time and full-time of Palace’s home defeat to West Ham, Patrick Vieira entered the pitch to remonstrate with Darren England. During the second of those exchanges, things got so heated that Palace defender Joel Ward had to drag Vieira away before it escalated. He can still expect a letter from the Football Association to drop on his doormat this week.
Amusingly, in his post-match interview, Vieira accepted that the West Ham penalty decision, which was the only vaguely controversial incident in the match, was correct: “I think it is the referee’s decision and from where I was it was difficult to say if it was a penalty at first. I had the chance to see it after and I think it was a penalty.”
This stuff matters. It sets a tone, at the highest level, that you can just lambast the referee because you are frustrated and the current attitude of many supporters suggests that managers and players have a popular mandate to behave this way. How dare a manager enter the pitch to jab his finger and shout in the face of an official, even if he had made a mistake?
The general retort here is that the current referees are the worst they have ever been, or that they need replacing. Which I’m absolutely on board with as long as they can tell us all where this magic cupboard containing better referees than we currently have is hidden. This is the best set of referees in the country; if you think they aren’t good enough it suggests that the environment (abuse culture), or system (introduction of VAR) is broken.
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Everton
Forgive the bluntness, but what on earth is going on at Everton? They have a manager that very few supporters want, whatever the merits of his previous success. That is clearly having an impact on the pitch, because Everton are underperforming badly. The club’s owner has publicly insisted that Rafael Benitez is the right man for the job but sacked the club’s sporting director.
There was no money to spend in the summer but Everton have signed a new left-back for £19m from Dynamo Kiev, ostensibly because Benitez has fallen out with Lucas Digne. There are now reports that Everton will pay up to £16m for Rangers right-back Nathan Patterson. With Marcel Brands out of a job, are we to assume that Benitez is leading transfer policy?
Plenty of questions, no obvious answers. And all the while Everton slip closer to the bottom three. You can see why supporters are angry.
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Leeds United
A mammoth win. Leeds’ players knew that this was a potentially season-defining afternoon and yet displayed precious few nerves. They did slip to let Burnley back into the match, but that only made the eventual victory even sweeter. As does achieving it without Patrick Bamford, Kalvin Phillips and Liam Cooper, probably three of their six most important players.
Leeds pushed forward, unsettling Burnley in exactly the manner we saw Marcelo Bielsa’s side do last season to such wonderfully alluring effect. They had 22 shots, the most they have managed in a Premier League game since Sheffield United since April (and the most against a current Premier League team since Newcastle United in December 2020). But they were also strong defensively. Leeds allowed Burnley to have seven shots in total; only twice since their promotion have they faced so few.
Most importantly of all, under-pressure players stepped up to the plate. Robin Koch dealt well with Chris Wood. Junior Firpo produced probably his best performance in a Leeds shirt and Bielsa’s side created chances without Raphinha being the star. Of the 17 chances created by Leeds players, the Brazilian was only responsible for two.
Burnley were pretty rotten and one win does not take Leeds clear of trouble; that is worth emphasising. But then those thoughts are for another day. And Leeds will reason that if they finish above Burnley this season, they will stay up. This was their most important victory since promotion.
Leicester City
Game postponed due to Covid-19 outbreak.
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Liverpool
Managers obsess about control. It’s all very well putting on a show, but the team that wins the league will roughly be the side that controls games the best, with and without the ball. It is – and this almost goes without saying – what makes Manchester City so good under Pep Guardiola.
Liverpool are different. Their majesty, at least from a neutral’s perspective, comes from a lack of control. While Manchester City purr their way through matches, a classical symphony of a performance, Liverpool clash and clang and crash their way forwards. At any moment of this season, you could envisage Liverpool conceding or scoring a goal within the next 30 seconds and yet wouldn’t necessarily be able to predict how.
Against most teams, that is more than good enough for victory. Jurgen Klopp has assembled a group of players with such prodigious talent (and proven himself so capable of improving them) that the noise is deafening for the majority of their opponents. But occasionally, a team turns up intent to go toe-to-toe with Liverpool. And that’s when the fun really starts.
There was a point during the first half when Fabinho and N’Golo Kante, joining Rodri as two of the three defensive midfield maestros of the Premier League, must have given each other a desperate look and each raised an eyebrow, the personification of that “Ah s___, here we go again” meme. There’s only so much controlling you can do when everyone around you is intent on losing their heads and having a wonderful time doing it.
This was a raucous, brilliant advert for the Premier League. Chelsea started quickly and troubled Liverpool, celebrating that moral victory by conceding two goals scored by two sensational forwards who Liverpool – and the Premier League in general – will be sad to lose for the next six weeks. Sadio Mane showed Christian Pulisic how to round a goalkeeper before Mohamed Salah played a psychological prank on Marcos Alonso with a weaving run without the ball and a stabbed finish with it.
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But ultimately, it proves why Liverpool will fall short in the title race. They did not soak up Chelsea pressure. They did not enjoy long spells of possession to suck the life out of the crowd and they left enough space in their defence to give Chelsea heart. They lacked control when control would surely have kept them in touch with the league leaders.
Liverpool are the best team to watch in the title race, and that’s both a compliment and an insult. Their zenith is higher than any other team in the country, but their ability to make life difficult for themselves as well as easy is their undoing. And when you watch them play open, expansive, entertaining matches against the league’s elite club, you realise that you wouldn’t have them any other way.
Manchester City
Pep Guardiola was happy to accept after the match that his side were second best. Guardiola has a tendency to pour praise on vanquished opponents, but this was a little different; City were indeed outplayed for long periods and it is hard to believe that they would have turned the game around without Arsenal’s individual mistakes.
But that only makes this a more significant victory. Firstly, Manchester City overcame one of the weirder statistical quirks in English football. Since 1995, they had only won one Premier League match after trailing at half time, a run that encompassed 97 different attempts to do it. The reasons behind that pattern may have shifted – City have gone from trailing a lot in the 90s and 00s and being unable to recover to not trailing as often in the 10s – but it is still a remarkable record that has now been erased.
And it leaves City and Guardiola with one hand on the title again. They only have two current top-half teams to play away from home and they will avoid the fixture pile-up. They will lose only one player to Afcon and they have won 11 straight league matches. As Thomas Tuchel said on Saturday, they have advantages but having advantages is not enough to win titles; Guardiola has maximised those advantages too.
Manchester United
Twenty minutes into Manchester United’s home game against Burnley (and, level of opponent notwithstanding, it was a good 20 minutes), I found myself trying to work out what was different about Ralf Rangnick’s team before realising that Bruno Fernandes was not playing. It had totally slipped my mind.
That feels pretty significant. When Bruno first arrived at Old Trafford, he thrived because he was handed the task of being the chief creative threat, effectively accommodated into a free role that gave him licence to wander as he pleased, safe in the knowledge that he would make it work. Under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, it was often said that United were a team of individuals. Bruno was the best example of that. The description doesn’t imply selfishness or a lack of teamwork, simply that United left him to do what he did best.
Under Rangnick, United are trying to be different. He is attempting to retrain them to work not as a collection of individuals but as a team, both with and without the ball. Of every player in United’s squad, it is Bruno who needs to most alter his previous style to fit into Rangnick’s strategy.
Add to that the problem of formation. Rangnick prefers a 4-2-2-2 formation, in which Bruno’s natural place would be as one of the two behind the forwards (he is not the type of central midfielder to play in the two in front of defence). But the Burnley win offered evidence that those positions are best taken by wide players, and United certainly have better options (Rashford, Greenwood, Sancho) than crowbarring Bruno in there.
If Bruno was in supreme creative form, Rangnick would surely be tempted to try and find a way to build a team around him. But increasingly, Bruno is operating in wider or deeper positions than he would like, getting visibly frustrated as he goes. One option is to play him as one of the front two, perhaps dovetailing with Mason Greenwood when he starts on the right. The other is to keep him on the bench, unthinkable six months ago.
Newcastle United
Game postponed due to Covid-19 outbreak.
Norwich City
Game postponed due to Covid-19 outbreak.
Southampton
Game postponed due to Covid-19 outbreak.
Tottenham
Sticky patches in matches where you wonder why Tottenham aren’t trying to move the ball quicker? Check. Defensively solid but lethargic and, dare we say it, a little boring? Check. Ultimately getting it done so those concerns temporarily evaporate? Check, check and check.
Since Antonio Conte was appointed, Tottenham sit second in the Premier League for points earned per game. You can reasonably point at the fixture list as a part explanation – over that run, of teams who sit in the top half, Spurs have only played Liverpool. But the point stands (and Tottenham should have beaten Liverpool anyway). Until we see more evidence to the contrary, all the signs are that Spurs are very lucky to have Conte.
As an aside, we have surely reached the end of the road for Tanguy Ndombele at Tottenham. Conte is the third different permanent manager who doesn’t seem to trust him enough to start games regularly. On Saturday, Oliver Skipp started over Ndombele and Harry Winks and Giovani Lo Celso came off the bench instead of him. Another record signing that hasn’t worked out.
Watford
Another hammer blow. Watford have now conceded seven times in the last ten minutes of their league matches this season. In the space of one Davinson Sanchez header, Claudio Ranieri’s team went from a hard-earned point that would give them confidence to their lowest ebb of the season.
Watford supporters have been understandably quick to point out that this is not another Quique Sanchez Flores situation. Ranieri has six points from 11 league games and Flores was sacked after seven in 10, but the difference is that Flores’s squad were under-performing whereas supporters feel this team just isn’t good enough. Which all makes sacking Xisco Munoz after taking seven points from seven games with that same squad seem a little harsh.
Ranieri is set to be backed in January. Reports are already linking Watford with Nice left-back Hassane Kamara, KAS Eupen midfielder Edo Kayembe and Besiktas central defender Domagoj Vida. The question then becomes how quickly new signings can be acclimated into the squad, but it’s worth the risk.
But make no mistake: Ranieri is under pressure. Watford have not had an easy run, but they have lost six straight league games. Their next two matches – Newcastle away and Norwich at home – may decide his fate.
West Ham
I’m aware of the pitfalls of criticising a team after they win, so let’s start by praising David Moyes’ side for getting back on track with two away wins after a sticky run of one win in seven. Most impressively, West Ham have started scoring goals at will away from home. They have scored four or more times on the road in the Premier League this season, as many as they did between January 2017 and the beginning of 2021/22.
But it’s also true that West Ham are allowing their opponents far more shots in recent weeks, no surprise given the injuries to Angelo Ogbonna, Kurt Zouma and Aaron Cresswell. Up to the away fixture at Arsenal on 15 December, West Ham were facing an average of 12.8 shots per game. Over the last four games, against Arsenal, Southampton, Watford and Crystal Palace, they have faced an average of 16.5 shots per game.
Their two highest expected goals against figures in a league match this season have both come in those last four games, including against Palace on Saturday. Moyes must be allow to recruit another defender in January to ease the workload on those who are fit.
Wolves
One of the inevitabilities of the recent spate of Covid-19 related postponements is that teams potentially enter fixtures with very different energy levels. On Monday evening, Manchester United face Wolves having played on the evening of December 30. Wolves haven’t played a match since 19 December.
That’s particularly interesting here because it raises the question of whether Bruno Lage will alter Wolves’ approach. Before their spate of postponements, Wolves were on one of the lowest-scoring runs in Premier League history. Their previous six matches had contained just four goals in total, the fewest in a six-game Premier League run since Wigan Athletic did the same in 2009.
And that’s been Wolves under Lage all season. They began this weekend in eighth position despite having two games in hand on some teams and having scored only 13 goals in 18 matches. According to Opta, that is the highest position any side has been at Christmas in top-flight history having scored so few goals. The positive spin – and Lage deserves the focus to be positive, given their league position – is that Wolves are resilient at the back and make the most of the goals they do score.
But with Manchester United tired and them well rested (other than, of course, the players who have suffered from Covid), it will be fascinating to see if Lage asks his team to be a little more expansive and try and take the game to United. Either that or it’ll be another 1-0 or 0-0.
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