The Score is Daniel Storey’s weekly verdict on all 20 Premier League teams’ performances. Sign up here to receive the newsletter every Monday morning
Thanks to Tottenham’s exploits at the Etihad, we have a Premier League title race to look forward to once more. Assuming Liverpool can keep up their end of their bargain between now and then, April’s meeting between Jurgen Klopp’s in-form side and Manchester City could be an absolute cracker.
An unexpected win for Harry Kane and co was particularly timely for them too given top-four rivals Manchester United, Arsenal and Wolves also picked up victories. At the opposite end of the table, Burnley and Watford both sealed crucial away wins in their bid to avoid the drop.
This weekend’s results
Saturday 19 February
- West Ham 1-1 Newcastle
- Arsenal 2-1 Brentford
- Aston Villa 0-1 Watford
- Brighton 0-3 Burnley
- Crystal Palace 1-0 Chelsea
- Liverpool 3-1 Norwich
- Southampton 2-0 Everton
- Man City 2-3 Tottenham
Sunday 20 February
Arsenal
In December, Thomas Partey gave an interview in which he was asked for a rating out of ten for his Arsenal career to that point; he awarded himself a four. That reflected frustrations to build any concerted period of strong form, but also the fact that Partey didn’t really seem to have a natural role in the team. He arrived as a box-to-box midfielder but Arsenal had little use for that. They have an abundance of creative attacking midfielders. If Partey pushes on, it risks Arsenal being caught on the break.
Since that interview, Partey has noticeably upped his game and has been used more as a natural No. 6. Against Brentford on Saturday, he broke up counters, won headers and made tackles. With Granit Xhaka alongside him, Partey still has some licence to get forward (he had five shots and created a goal, after all), but there is a benefit to a more one-dimensional role if it simplifies what is expected of Partey.
Yes there was a poor misplaced pass in the first half that almost put Arsenal in trouble; Partey isn’t perfect. But if Mikel Arteta can build a central midfield around him and one other, using two players as defensive shields while Emile Smith-Rowe and Bukayo Saka are aided by attacking full-backs (Cedric and Kieran Tierney attempted 22 crosses between them on Saturday), Arsenal will be a more coherent team for it.
Aston Villa
Steven Gerrard is now in a hole of his own making. It isn’t just that Aston Villa have taken five points from their last seven matches, or that Dean Smith was sacked after taking six points from his final seven games. It’s that Villa were absolutely rotten against Newcastle last weekend and therefore that Gerrard was tasked with provoking a response. Somehow, Villa were worse against Watford on Saturday.
The specific current issue appears to be that Villa were already a fairly creative team that shipped silly goals and often struggled to take its chances, and yet Philippe Coutinho was their landmark January signing. Coutinho is a creator who offers little defensively. Now everything goes through him, which is fine when he plays well and becomes highly problematic when he doesn’t. Villa are still a fairly creative team that ships silly goals and often struggles to take its chances. And now they are reliant upon a player who may well not be at Villa Park next season.
There’s also a wider, quasi-philosophical problem. Villa have made no secret of their desire to spend heavily to make a push for the European places. But on current evidence, Villa’s investment has made them worse, not better. Coutinho stays high up the pitch. Lucas Digne is an attacking left-back who leaves spaces in behind. Villa took 1.44 points per game in the Premier League last season and that has dropped to 1.13 points per game this season.
Nobody is saying that you should reject the chance to sign better players. But it is not a strategy in itself. It only works if you then fit those players into a coherent, balanced system and it only works if you have a coach that proves themselves capable of improving the players they inherited.
This is now Gerrard’s problem. He clearly has plenty of time to fix things, but Villa supporters are getting restless at their team’s inability to halt a slump that has not been altered by a change in manager. If that’s not all on Gerrard, his club has spent more than £350m on new players since June 2019 and that creates significant pressure on the person tasked with coaching and assembling them.
Brentford
This is becoming an emergency situation. Brentford have played 26 matches and are only seven points ahead of a Burnley team in 19th that have four games in hand on them. Losing away at Arsenal is hardly a shock, but Brentford were pitifully toothless, barely bothering to try and attack an opponent who they spooked on the opening night of the season. It’s now one point from the last 21 available.
Thomas Frank’s problem is that there is not much he can do to change things. He is unlikely to shift away from Brentford’s 3-5-2 formation that had served them so well. Therein lies the nagging issue with a “system team” – when your opponents find ways to counteract your threat it leaves you a little helpless.
Now come the biggest three fixtures of Brentford’s season. The one positive spin of a run of seven matches without a win is that it included defeats against Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal, Wolves and Manchester United. Frank’s team play Newcastle, Norwich and Burnley in their next three games with a chance to put distance between themselves and the bottom three.
But that only works as cause for optimism if Brentford improve to face the challenge. All three of those forthcoming opponents are in better form than them and all three of their managers will be eyeing up the chance to bring Brentford into the relegation mix. Extend the current slump to the wider angle: after 12 points from their opening seven league games, when the buzz of promotion still lingered, Brentford have doubled that points tally in 19 further matches.
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The worst result and worst performance of their season to date. The obvious explanation is that taking Lewis Dunk, Adam Webster and Dan Burn out of a central defence is likely to make any team more vulnerable. The angry exchange between Shane Duffy and Robert Sanchez reflected a worrying lack of communication and confidence in one another. Duffy has been a great servant to Brighton but probably isn’t Premier League level anymore.
Still, that doesn’t excuse the shambles of Saturday and Brighton are not immune to these flat performances that check their general progress. If you are lacking your best two centre-backs, that should provoke a hardwired response to fight harder and longer to account for the shortfall. On Saturday, Brighton simply rolled over and accepted their fate; that isn’t good enough.
Burnley
I’ll happily admit that I didn’t see this coming, but then I didn’t think Wout Weghorst would be fit and it’s impossible to overstate the difference he has made since coming in. The finish for the first goal was excellent, but better still is Weghorst’s link-up play. You have to remind yourself that he’s only had a handful of training sessions with his teammates.
“Wout played outstandingly well considering he’s so new to what we do,” said Sean Dyche after the game, with a smile that suggested he knows he’s been handed the perfect striker for his system. “I’d be surprised if there’s not more [goals] to come. The way he plays, his quality, he brings others into play, he’s got a real team ethic and he has quality, there’s no two ways about that.”
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And for those of us who assumed Weghorst might be used as a target man a la Chris Wood, some evidence to the contrary: in his 17 league appearances for Burnley this season, Wood won 93 aerial duels. Weghorst has only won eight in four appearances and didn’t win a single one against Brighton.
Chelsea
Has this relationship now been irrevocably broken? For all the positivity of a last-minute winner, achieved despite being outplayed for long periods, the standout statistic from Selhurst Park was that Romelu Lukaku touched the ball seven times in 90 minutes, a record since Opta began collecting such data in 2003. One of those touches was the kick-off to start the match.
There is fault on both sides here. We do not know if Lukaku was instructed to stay so high up the pitch, but even so it reflects badly upon his confidence and form that he was so painfully unable to get involved in the game. At his best, he is a dominant centre forward who drops deep and delights in dominating in one-on-one duels on the ground and in the air. We saw no evidence of that on Saturday.
But then why are Chelsea persisting with this approach? You can make sweeping conclusions about the standard of Serie A defences to dilute praise for Lukaku’s goalscoring record in Italy, but what became clear under Antonio Conte is that Lukaku excels most when he has a centre forward close to him and is allowed to drift deep and wide to play with space in front of him. Thomas Tuchel retains far more loyalty amongst Chelsea supporters than Lukaku (and rightly so), but it’s hard to see who gains out of this strategy.
Crystal Palace
Prepare yourself for the slightly Proper Football Man opinion: it’s all very well playing nice football but if you can’t stop making sloppy individual and collective mistakes and haven’t got a player you can trust to finish chances then you won’t go far.
On the defensive issue, evidence suggests that it’s either an issue of concentration or that Patrick Vieira’s football (and Palace’s small squad) means that his players are suffering from fatigue late in matches. Here are two statistics that all say pretty much the same thing (and none of them are complimentary):
– Crystal Palace have conceded 15 goals in the first 30 minutes of both halves (minutes 0-30 and 45-75); they have conceded 21 goals in the other 30 minutes of their matches.
– Crystal Palace have conceded 22 per cent of their league goals this season after the 85th minute.
Those things matter because the timings of your goals conceded make a huge difference to the mood amongst players and supporters. Palace are unlikely to get sucked into trouble (they’re eight points above Watford as it stands), but their only league win in the last two months has come at home to Norwich.
Everton
Last week, this column remarked that Everton would be a rollercoaster team under Frank Lampard at least until the summer. The problem with rollercoasters is that they can make you feel a little queasy if you ride them too much. And the problem with making Everton a roll-the-dice team is that they have more ones than sixes on their various faces.
Who really knows what a Lampard team is. Who really knows what this Everton team will be under his stewardship. Who really knows what difference he has made. Who really knows if beating Leeds was the exception or the rule, or whether the two calamitous defeats either side of it are more instructive. It’ll at least be fun for the neutrals to find out. Everton supporters may not fully agree.
But one thing that Lampard really must address quickly is Everton’s new-ish tendency to take shots from low-percentage areas. His three league matches are like a case study for expected goals: Everton have had 40 shots for a total xG of 3.0 and matched that xG perfectly on goals. Against Southampton on Saturday, Everton had nine shots from an average distance of 22 yards from goal.
Leeds
Three negative aspects of an absorbing match, which I am far more comfortable making given that Leeds lost:
- Illan Meslier’s shot-stopping has fallen off a cliff (and his kicking remains an issue). Before Sunday, Meslier had the lowest save percentage of any Premier League goalkeeper with 15 or more appearances this season and he conceded four goals from nine shots on target against Manchester United.
Meslier was in no man’s land for the first goal, allowed the second to creep under his body, was beaten at the near post for the third and somehow made himself smaller for the fourth and still saw the ball go between his legs. That might all sound hyper-critical, but these are standards by which elite goalkeepers are judged.
- We need to continue the conversation about head injuries, because nobody seems to be listening. When Robin Koch received treatment for the second time and left the field, he appeared to tell the medics that he was having issues with his vision. He should not have been on the field to suffer the after effects of an impact injury to the head.
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Leeds could have used a free substitution under the new concussion protocols, but you can see why they aren’t used (even if I disagree with it). Players want to stay on the pitch to cement a reputation amongst supporters for being committed to the cause and clubs don’t want to weaken their teams. We must introduce enforced temporary substitutions to allow for full assessments and we must accept that erring on the side of caution is the only viable approach to protect players.
- Whoever threw the coin at Anthony Elanga should never attend another football match in England. But it’s also not the first time that Leeds fans have thrown items (coin or bottle) at an opposing player this season and the club should face sanctions. When you have supporters cheering after Elanga was struck, you have a real problem. Nobody wants to punish the majority for the actions of a minority, but closing the bottom tier at Elland Road as a punishment would not be too heavy-handed.
Leicester
Groundhog Day. Leicester conceded in the first 10 minutes – only two teams in the division have done that more often this season. Leicester got themselves back into the game shortly before half-time – Leicester have scored more goals between 41 and 50 minutes than any other period of the match including in four of their last five matches in all competitions. Leicester wasted their chances to grab a firm hold of the match and then Leicester were punished. At least they didn’t concede from a set piece!
Who knows how long this continues for. Supporters are demonstrably unhappy at Brendan Rodgers’ perceived underperformance. Even if you consider him a victim of last season’s success (and that’s an argument that has some merit), everyone agrees that two wins in 13 league games isn’t good enough. They have to win their next two (Burnley away and Leeds at home) to quell the growing discontent.
Liverpool
Not a huge amount to say about a home win over Norwich City; the biggest moment of Liverpool’s weekend came 35 miles away later the same day when Harry Kane scored the winner at the Etihad.
Still, it’s worth briefly reflecting on Jurgen Klopp’s claim last week that this is the strongest squad of players he has ever managed. Over Liverpool’s two matches this week, Klopp has started 18 different players and Roberto Firmino, James Milner, Divock Origi and Curtis Jones started neither of them and Saturday’s match changed when Origi was brought on. They really do have enough to compete on all fronts.
Man City
Perhaps it’s only natural that every Manchester City defeat comes like a bolt out of the blue. When you only lose league matches infrequently and regularly build up a head of steam, it presents an image that City are relentless and unstoppable. As we’ve previously noted, that can cause its own problems; it leaves you unable to respond to setback.
And yet this was a different defeat to many others because City did haul themselves back into the match twice. They squandered chances (another hallmark of their league losses) but showed resilience to come from behind and merited their late equaliser.
Which will only make Pep Guardiola more angry. City were shambolic defensively. They knew exactly what Tottenham would try to do and knew exactly what Spurs’ biggest weapons were and yet, for a team that we are told are prepared meticulously for every fixture, defended in the manner of a team who had never watched their opponents play before.
Still, there is one overriding theme of City’s landmark Premier League defeats, particularly against Manchester United and Tottenham (who we can now safely say have a psychological hold over Guardiola). City’s weakness is not defending against counter-attack per se, but defending against lightning quick counter-attacks curated by fabulous attacking players designed to exploit the spaces.
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Look at City’s possession totals in some of those landmark league defeats since the beginning of last season: 66 per cent against Manchester United, 67 and 71 per cent vs Tottenham, 71 per cent vs Leeds United, 72 per cent vs Leicester. This is not an established correlation – City also had more than three-quarters of the ball against Arsenal and Everton and won by an aggregate score of 8-0.
But it does hint at the answer. You must stay deep, defend stoutly and get plenty of luck, but more importantly you must be very selective with your attacks. Attack too little and you just become a sitting duck; attack too often and Guardiola will simply instruct his players to ease off on the overloads and close the door. Attack just often enough and do so at rapid speed and with exact passes, and there is a weakness to be exploited.
And now we have ourselves a title race. Between now and the end of March, Liverpool must play Arsenal away and Manchester United at home. It is not unthinkable that they extend their run of consecutive league wins until they meet City, at the Etihad, on April 9. And if there’s any away team that is built to counter at pace, it’s them.
Man Utd
Firstly, that was one of the best matches of the season. There are obvious ingredients that make for a tremendous watch and this had all of them: grudge rivalry (particularly given the lack of recent history and supporters at matches), two teams who love to attack but have struggled to keep clean sheets, toing and froing of the scoreline, some nonsensical climatic conditions to add an element of total farce.
Given that we picked out three negative aspects for Leeds, here’s three positives for Manchester United:
– One of the criticisms of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was over his management of matches through substitutions. There were frowns aplenty when Ralf Rangnick took off Paul Pogba (who was probably the game’s best player) and brought on Fred, but Rangnick got it spot on. By allowing Fred to press high up the pitch and drive forward with the ball against tired legs, he created overlaps. Bringing on Anthony Elanga and having him and Jadon Sancho on the wings to stretch Leeds also worked a treat.
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– Sancho is finally showing signs of life, unsurprising given he flourished in a German coaching system and now has another system-based coach following Solskjaer’s individualism. The last 20 minutes against Leeds was him at his best, sometimes sprinting forward to stretch the game, sometimes slowing it down and protecting the ball, always finding the right space and picking the right pass. More of this please.
Newcastle
You can go right here to read our piece from the draw against West Ham, on the reinvention of Joelinton as an all-action, multi-functional midfielder.
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Norwich
No shame in losing at Anfield – and Norwich gave a better account of themselves than most supporters predicted – so instead let’s update last week’s statistic:
Norwich’s matches this season against the Big Six (plus West Ham, who are fifth): Played 10, Won 0, Drawn 0, Scored 1, Conceded 34. Still cripes, but at least they have scored a goal now.
Southampton
Given that they now have a five-point cushion to the bottom half, we can take a brief moment to praise Ralph Hasenhuttl for another excellent season on a comparatively shoestring budget. He inherited a club down in the dumps after the Mark Hughes era, finishing 17th in the previous season, has a net spend of around £10m over three years, has dealt admirably with the long-running takeover uncertainty and those horrible heavy defeats and may well lead Southampton to their best finish in five years. Hasenhuttl’s omission from all the usual shortlists for upwardly mobile mid-to-upper table clubs is a little baffling.
Tottenham
We have probably already reached peak “peak” culture, so let’s settle for concluding that this was a week in which Antonio Conte played all of his hits. It started with an interview given to Sky Italia in which Conte made comments about the club’s transfer window dealings (and made intimations on their dealings in general) that were pretty inflammatory.
Conte then used his pre-match press conference to act offended that anyone could interpret his comments as inflammatory, promoting an image of peace and harmony while simultaneously getting his point across. His Tottenham team then produced the best performance of his tenure to date. We were all getting a little worried about Spurs’ inability to beat a top-half team – how do you like them now?
Last weekend against Wolves, Conte cut a dejected figure on the touchline. We are used to his pitchside passion – the screaming, the arm-waving, the gestures accompanied by a look into the middle distance that suggests someone should probably hide the crockery in the dressing room. All that was absent; Conte stood with his arms folded as if contemplating deeply on all the decisions that had taken him to that moment.
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And Conte’s team were magnificent. They defended deep, they cut off the passing lanes, they worked as a team and they attacked with a ruthlessness that was enough to win any match and ended up winning it at least two times over. The plaudits will go to Harry Kane, who demonstrated just how good he can be in that multi-functional role of No. 10 creator and penalty-box poacher.
But more than that, the magic lies in the combination between Kane and Son. The first goal, surely one of the favourites of any Premier League neutral this season, does not happen without Kane’s speed of thought and execution nor Son’s composure to turn a good chance into an open goal. But it also doesn’t happen without the telepathic understanding between those two players.
That pair are hardly a secret; they have now directly combined for a record-equalling 36 goals in Premier League history – with Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba. But at their feet lies Tottenham’s top-four hopes and Conte’s chance of succeeding at Tottenham where Jose Mourinho and Nuno eventually failed. If nothing else, in the space of five first-half seconds and five more in second-half injury time, they breathed new life into Tottenham’s season.
Watford
“Emmanuel Dennis’ form has dropped off a cliff…. In his last five league appearances, Dennis has had seven shots, one of which was on target. His total xG over those five games was 0.3. They also desperately need to get Ismaila Sarr starting games again before it’s too late. He came on as a sub against Brighton, but Sarr has missed Watford’s last 11 league games and they have picked up two points during that run. Without him, Hodgson’s side suffer from a chronic lack of creativity and flair.”
Love it when a plan (sort of) comes together. On Saturday, Ismaila Sarr created four chances, Dennis surpassed his xG from his previous five matches in the space of 85 minutes and Watford won to keep everyone believing. If those two stay fit between now and May, they have a chance.
West Ham
One issue with weekly analysis (and you’ve got this far before I’ve admitted it) is that you can often make the diagnosis fit with your own hypothesis. If you watched West Ham on Saturday lunchtime knowing nothing about their season to date, you may simply conclude that they had an off day.
We know better than that, and so do West Ham supporters. The ferocity of the boos at full-time at the London Stadium was not directed towards David Moyes or his players, but to those in positions of power who did not answer the manager’s call to invest in the squad in January and allow him to make the best of a glorious half season that may now be wasted because fatigue is only going to hit harder when their European campaign restarts.
Again, maybe this is a misdiagnosis. Perhaps West Ham’s players were so utterly flat because they were surprised by the tenacity of their opponents. But it seems unlikely, given that West Ham had so much to gain by pushing for a winner and yet barely tested Martin Dubravka during the second half. Instead this is a group of players who played almost every game until January and know they must play another seven games before the March international break.
West Ham will likely fall to seventh when you take in the games in hand the teams below them still have and they have taken five points from their last four league games with Wolves and Liverpool to come next. It’s all such a huge waste because of some transfer market indecision.
Wolves
All hail Jose Sa (again). Last season, the best goalkeeper in the Premier League for save percentage and post-shot expected goals (effectively a measure of how many goals a goalkeeper has “saved” their team according to the quality of chances faced) were Nick Pope and Alphonse Areola. Pope had a save percentage of 77 per cent and Areola “saved” Fulham 7.6 goals.
After 24 matches of Wolves’ league season, Jose Sa ranks first for save percentage with a frankly ridiculous 85.3 per cent. Proof that they weren’t all easy saves from long-distance shots comes in the second statistic. He ranks second only to David De Gea for post-shot xG saved with a total almost matching Areola’s total from last season. Wolves sold Rui Patricio and bought his upgrade.
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