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
With the World Cup just a week away, you’d have forgiven plenty of players for telling the boss they felt “a bit tight” in warm-up and choosing to spend the afternoon sat on the second row of the bench aggressively chewing gum.
You could argue that the defenders at Spurs did effectively that, as Jesse Marsch’s Leeds came to town and put on their third seven-goal thriller of the season.
There will be no World Cup for the Premier League’s top-scorer though, and Erling Haaland will probably spend the next month wondering how Brentford managed to keep him quiet before scoring a late winner and opening the door for Arsenal, who pulled five points clear with their late-night victory over Wolves.
Here is i‘s verdict on the weekend.
This weekend’s results
Saturday 12 November
- Man City 1-2 Brentford
- Bournemouth 3-0 Everton
- West Ham 0-2 Leicester
- Liverpool 3-1 Southampton
- Nottingham Forest 1-0 Crystal Palace
- Tottenham 4-3 Leeds
- Newcastle 1-0 Chelsea
- Wolves 0-2 Arsenal
Sunday 13 November
- Brighton 1-2 Aston Villa
- Fulham 1-2 Man Utd
Arsenal
Arsenal are beginning to make this look rather straightforward. A theory posited by some – and rejected by Pep Guardiola – for Manchester City’s slow start and eventual shock defeat to Brentford was that focus had been allowed to drift with 10 of their starters heading to the World Cup. Mikel Arteta’s line-up contained eight bound for Qatar, but no such accusations can be levelled against their motivation.
The Gunners have had their noses bloodied at Molineux in the recent past, losing 3-1 there in April 2019 and 2-1 in February 2021 and while Wolves have declined considerably since those halcyon days, it was still telling just how comfortable it was for the visitors. William Saliba had an uneasy moment against Goncalo Guedes early on, but otherwise Arsenal were in complete control, like an older sibling keeping a younger one at arm’s length while they desperately swing wild, ineffective punches.
Encouragingly for Arteta, they did it without the influential Granit Xhaka too, the Swiss was withdrawn after 15 minutes due to a stomach bug. His replacement Fabio Vieira isn’t exactly like-for-like – the waifish playmaker looks like a relic of the late Wenger-era – but he slotted in seamlessly alongside Thomas Partey and provided the assist for Martin Odegaard’s first goal with an intelligent dinked cross. The Norwegian goalscorer meanwhile is one of those players that possesses a Matrix-esque ability to slow everything down around them; he is the controller-in-chief for a team that is becoming increasingly adept at bending a football match in its favour.
Finally, a word on Gabriel Jesus, whose desperate search for a goal continues. The Brazilian’s barren run now stands at 11 games and it was indicative of his current penalty box misfortune that he fired one effort into the net from an offside position and another off the crossbar. It matters little though when there are plenty of others able to pick up the slack. Arsenal are one of two clubs in the division, along with Liverpool, to have a trio of players with five-plus goals to their name.
Aston Villa
Unai Emery should apply for membership of the Magic Circle. After conjuring Villa’s first home league victory over Manchester United since 1995 on his debut in the Villa Park dugout, his next trick on Sunday was a first away win of the season and only their second on the road since 10 March.
His Villa side overcame the shock of conceding a goal after only 49 seconds, fought tigerishly and stayed with Brighton’s runners as the home side threatened to overrun them in the first half. It was panic stations against the press at times, although Ings always carried a threat on the break.
And after they had they clawed their way in front, they did what they had to do, taking ages over every goal kick and throw-in, and adopting a “they-shall-not-pass approach” that brought seven yellow cards – six of them coming after the 79th minute – but also three points.
Outside the bottom three only on alphabetical order when Steven Gerrard was sacked, they go into the World Cup break in a relatively healthy 12th place, and Emery made no apology for their rugged approach, declaring himself “so proud of our players, our work and our supporters”.
“I think the first step was to be competitive. My challenge was to win away, we played well in Manchester [against United in the Carabao Cup] on Thursday but didn’t keep our mentality to the end. Today was different. Defensively we had to be together, and focused at set pieces.
“We were at the bottom of the Premier League and two victories give us confidence. We are looking up and our challenge will come in thinking to improve. After the break we play Liverpool away and Tottenham at home, which are tough games. I want to create a good spirit and those six points will keep us calm in the next weeks.”
Ings, he suggested, will be a key player in the second half of the season. “He is a striker and he needs players to pass to him and today I think they understood perfectly. His goals are very important for us and if we can help him to get in good positions to score, then he will do.”
Bournemouth
It’s gone a little under the radar, particularly after their sticky run of form, but Bournemouth have been the Premier League’s most efficient team in front of goal this season. Their 122 shots is 23 fewer than any other club and yet Bournemouth rank 11th for goals scored. So what’s the explanation?
Firstly, Bournemouth are performing well above their expected goals, which does hint that they may regress to the mean at some point. They have scored with 15 per cent of their shots, which no Premier League team can beat. They are also getting 39.3 per cent of their shots on target, also the best in the division.
There’s also a methodology here that means regression is not guaranteed. Bournemouth essentially prioritise the creation of high-quality chances. Rather than rush to make the final pass or to cross the ball into the box to Kieffer Moore (occasionally to Moore’s frustration), they are patient and will wait until the right moment comes.
They are also very disciplined in their shooting. Promoted teams – and any other strugglers – can often get a little desperate in front of goal, taking shots from distance in a bid to grasp for a foothold in a match. Bournemouth are the opposite: only Liverpool have a lower average shot distance in the Premier League.
Brentford
A fortnight ago, this column discussed Ivan Toney’s open-play goal drought and concluded as follows:
“Needed to stay high against Aston Villa last weekend, Toney had 36 touches of the ball but only two were in the opposition penalty area. He had five touches in the box against Wolves, but he still tended to move far away from goal to get involved in play.
“The issue might well be because of the system. Last season, Brentford most often used a 3-5-2 formation in which the wing-backs were asked to overlap. Now Brentford are using a 4-3-3 shape, which forces the full-backs to be a little more defensive. Aaron Hickey and Rico Henry, the two full-backs, have created only eight chances between them.”
Love it when a plan comes together in style. On Saturday, for the first time this season, Brentford reverted to their 3-5-2 formation from last season. Thomas Frank had clearly instructed Toney to stay high up the pitch. To service him, Brentford looked more direct.
It worked beautifully. Brentford’s direct passes had the desired effect, unnerving Man City’s defenders, Toney scored twice and Brentford won the match in the last minute. Most impressively of all, Toney had 10 touches of the ball in the opposition penalty area. He has only surpassed that one in a regular league game since the beginning of the 2020-21 season.
Brighton
A gag was going around Sussex late last week to the effect that Brighton & Hove Albion had upgraded at head coach and left back, and that Chelsea had paid them the best part of £80m to do so. That was after three successive victories, their first since Roberto De Zerbi had replaced Chelsea-bound Graham Potter, but defeat yesterday at the hands of Aston Villa, also under a new coach, was something of a reality check.
In fact, each of those wins had come with a caveat: the 4-1 trouncing of Chelsea rode a tidal wave of venom from the Amex Stadium seats directed at Potter and erstwhile Seagull Marc Cucurella, and was aided by Potter’s poor team selection and two own goals from Chelsea players; the 3-2 victory away to Wolves came against a toothless home side and at a lucky ground, where Brighton’s win percentage is better than at their own stadium; and the midweek 3-1 win at Arsenal was in a Carabao Cup tie in which both sides fielded below-strength teams and in which backup goalkeeper Jason Steele had to make two excellent saves. And all three victories had come against teams that play the game by coming out to attack.
De Zerbi’s Brighton move the ball more quickly than under Potter but they take risks, which is largely as advertised from his tenure at Sassuolo in Italy, their willingness to receive the ball under pressure and intricate passing at pace inviting interception. Yesterday they opened the scoring through ambitious pressing of their own, conceded a penalty when too open and were caught in possession before Danny Ings put Villa ahead.
After that, the game assumed the normal shape of Brighton home games against teams that sit deep, their neat attacks breaking against a wall of defenders. In the absence through illness of Japan winger Kaoru Mitoma and with Adam Lallana limping off after only four minutes, they had nobody unpredictable enough to unlock the Villa rearguard. Revealingly, they managed only two shots on target after scoring ten times in their previous three games. De Zerbi now has six weeks to get back to the drawing board.
Chelsea
A statistic that will alarm Graham Potter: Chelsea have lost three consecutive Premier League games for the first time since November 2015. Chelsea went on to finish 10th in 2015-16, recording their lowest league position in two decades. The “Jose Mourinho season” as Antonio Conte mischievously labelled it. The current incumbent at Stamford Bridge will be hoping 2022-23 isn’t referred to as the “Graham Potter season” in the same disparaging way.
Joining a new club after a season has already started rather than before a ball has been kicked invariably poses greater challenges for a manager. Potter and his backroom staff, cherry-picked from Brighton, haven’t had a pre-season to implement their tactical framework, identify the players central to their “project” and make a clean break from the previous regime.
The subsequent disconnect is patently apparent when you watch Chelsea play. Potter made numerous personnel changes from week to week at Brighton and it worked because the overarching philosophy was more important than the component parts; he is attempting the same thing at Chelsea, but instead of producing coherent, attractive football it is leading to muddled performances, mid-game formation tweaks, and multiple makeshift wing-backs.
At St James’ Park, four different players were tasked with playing as a right-sided wing-back, or when the system changed to 4-3-3, a more conventional full-back: Ruben Loftus-Cheek (a midfielder), Cesar Azpilicueta (a specialist, but one whose legs have gone), Conor Gallagher (a midfielder) and Trevoh Chalobah (a centre-back). Injuries forced Potter’s hand to a certain extent, but trying to cram square pegs into round holes has been a feature of the early days of his Chelsea tenure. Even Raheem Sterling, the club’s marquee summer signing, and Christian Pulisic, the Lebron James of soccer, have been trialled as wing-backs.
Like Jesse Marsch at Leeds, Potter has quickly discovered that replacing a popular manager is not easy. The fans that welcomed Thomas Tuchel’s departure were a minority group. Discontent is growing. After an encouraging start that yielded five wins from Potter’s first six games, Chelsea have since won just two of their last eight. The World Cup break will provide some welcome relief and the opportunity for a proper reset.
Crystal Palace
A fortnight ago, this column reflected on how Patrick Vieira has successfully transformed Palace firstly from a team that was entirely reactive to one that dominated the ball and then compromised on that principle because the strengths of the squad – a glut of quick, skillful attacking midfielders – made counter attacks a rich source of clear chances.
That success was best viewed by Palace’s success at home, where they had been able to tempt their opponents (Southampton, Wolves, Leeds, Villa) to have more possession and then hit them on the break – Palace averaged 50 per cent of the ball in those four games.
On Saturday, we saw the other side of this problem. Before then, Vieira’s team hadn’t recorded more than 60 per cent possession in a game all season. But Steve Cooper had worked that out. He picked a strikerless formation, told his defence to sit deep and his three most attacking players – Lingard, Johnson, Gibbs-White – to play in midfield. That both forced Palace’s defenders up the pitch and also required the visitors to have more of the ball. They had 68 per cent of it, a total surpassed in their away games only once since the beginning of last season (a 1-1 draw at Norwich, also bottom of the league).
Cooper got it right. Palace did squander a fine chance from the penalty spot, but were wholly ineffective when chasing the game after Gibbs-White’s goal because Forest packed their final third and offered no space. This was the first time that Palace have failed to have a shot on target since a 1-0 defeat to Chelsea in February.
Everton
Is Frank Lampard now in big trouble? Is everyone outside the Premier League’s top six going to change managers this season at some point?
Being outplayed by Bournemouth once could be considered careless, but doing it twice in a week in two different competitions, both having exactly the same hallmarks, should be considered as an act of negligence. Everton, without a trophy since 1995, were dismal in the EFL Cup but at least that was a much-changed team. On Saturday, their supposedly best XI capitulated.
The most concerning aspect of that defeat, particularly given what happened in the cup game, was that Conor Coady admitted after the match that Everton’s opponents seemed to want it more. That is unforgivable given all we thought we knew about Lampard: a fairly basic tactical coach but a man who could organise a defence and inspire players.
The one improvement in Everton under Lampard was in their defending. They do not create lots of chances and they do not take enough of the ones they do create. James Tarkowski and Coady, though, knew what they were doing and Jordan Pickford was one of the best goalkeepers in the league according to the chances he had faced. So when that triangle breaks, Everton have nothing.
And when you focus so much of your management on one thing and then look incapable of solving issues, you merit your suitability for your job being called into question. Lampard has now been at Everton for 10 months and he has the third-worst win percentage of any non-short-term (10 games or more) manager. The only ones below him: Mike Walker’s abysmal season in 1994 and Howard Kendall in 1997-98, when he was consumed by personal issues.
A reminder that Lampard was given £70m of new players this summer (including three central midfielders, a striker and a winger), a left-back on loan and two England international central defenders for free. Everton have a decision to make.
Fulham
It can’t be easy being understudy to the London legends that are Harry Kane and Aleksandar Mitrovic, or having the same name as someone who scores for fun at Real Madrid.
Carlos Vinicius still has it all to prove at Fulham though as the man up front in the absence of the injured Mitrovic.
The 27-year-old Brazilian has now deputised for the Serb against both Manchester sides in the space of a week, and been part of narrow 2-1 defeats that could so easily have featured far more palatable score-lines.
Those are his only starts so far, and the man whose career highlight in English football remains an FA Cup hat-trick against Marine – a club so tiny an electron microscope seems of more use to find their ground than Google Maps – has yet to find the net for his current employers. And he only scored once in Premier League action during a season-long loan from Benfica in 2020-21 when Jose Mourinho was Spurs manager.
At 6ft 3in, the Brazilian certainly boasts the build to be Mitrovic’s body double and the early signs against United were promising but, like Anthony Martial at the other end, his second half contribution was minimal.
Once in each half he was denied the goal he craved by reflex stops from David de Gea, who was far busier than United manager Erik ten Hag would have liked. But too many times Vinicius allowed the ball to bounce off him, or a defender to get around him and stick a boot in. Just nine touches in the first half tells its own story.
Leeds
Last week, we said that Leeds United were a club destined for its own self-manufactured chaos. So what better way to celebrate that fact than by losing a game they led three times in a week after winning a game they trailed by two goals in?
This was the best and worst of this Leeds; so often you are treated to the whole gamut of their nonsense in 90 minutes. They created chances out of very little, and this new efficiency in their shooting is very welcome. They buzzed and bristled in midfield. They had a red card – obviously. They continuously shot themselves in the shot with foolish defensive decision-making (honestly, is there even any foot left at this point?). They frightened a Big Six team but then ultimately succumbed. Jesse Marsch said that the game “encapsulated our sixteen-game season in one match”, and he’s right.
All it does is provoke a series of incredibly basic questions that should, by now, be easy to answer and yet provoke only blank looks and laughter as you try to tie yourself in knots working them out: is this team good? Is this manager good? Does this team know what it is doing? Does this team know what it is trying to do? Can this team change? Judging Leeds is like asking a small child to follow their finger around an Escher painting, or tempting a cat to chase a mouse on a digital screen.
Perhaps uncertainty itself provides some certainty: Marsch has been in charge long enough that some of these answers should be obvious. But then you see the young players scoring, the belief when pushing for a winner at Anfield and a league table that has Leeds a few points off the top half and the belief flickers. More importantly for us neutrals, why on earth would you want the circus to end?
Leicester
Now that Leicester have firmly put aside any talk of relegation and crisis, it’s interesting to reflect on just how they are doing this and what fun it is to watch. Put simply, Leicester have turned themselves around completely in attack.
For most of their time in the Premier League, Leicester were subservient to their centre-forward. That was fully understandable: Jamie Vardy was brilliant and brilliantly prolific and feasted upon service. Then, as Vardy aged, Rodgers opted for the refined version. Leicester would be a little slow in possession, but that worked because they picked the moments to play passes to Vardy, it made them more defensively solid and Vardy still scored enough goals to make the difference.
Then, the third, bad, age. Leicester roughly tried to do the same thing, but the defending (particularly from set pieces) fell off a cliff. Leicester were either left chasing a game and asking too much of Vardy or, more often, having their midfielders too deep and strikers isolated because they were afraid of conceding goals.
Now, the new Leicester. Vardy, once the player who had the most shots in the Premier League and a striker that the team was built to assist, is now playing the subservient role. Now they stay high up the pitch but are used to stretch the play and create space for the attacking midfielders (who are now Leicester’s best players). Vardy and Patson Daka have played roughly 15.5 combined league games and had 30 shots. That’s fewer than both James Maddison and Harvey Barnes (39 and 32) have had in considerably less time.
Liverpool
After a weekend during which Roberto Firmino scored twice to help get over the disappointment of being left out of Brazil’s World Cup squad, it’s worth emphasising just how many Liverpool players will remain at the club during the World Cup break.
Only seven of Jurgen Klopp’s players are going to Qatar: Alisson, Fabinho, Ibrahima Konate, Jordan Henderson, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Darwin Nunez and Virgil van Dijk. Of that group, Alexander-Arnold, Henderson and Konate are unlikely to be first choice and Alisson’s fatigue is not a huge worry.
By way of comparison, Tottenham have 11 players at the World Cup, Manchester United have 14 and Manchester City 16. Given all of Klopp’s thoughts about player fatigue and his hope of rebuilding Liverpool’s season after Christmas, he could not have asked for better news.
Man City
For all the obvious versatility in Manchester City’s attack, it’s amazing how panicky they can get from time to time. Sometimes they nail it, even when you would think that everyone would be losing their heads – see the final-day victory over Aston Villa last season for the perfect example of a team sticking to their guns. On Saturday, they really didn’t.
Perhaps their lack of defensive solidity was the problem. Because Ivan Toney was causing the central defenders so many problems, Pep Guardiola felt that he could not overload the final third, allowing full-backs into midfield to play the passing triangles that dragged opponents out of position.
So instead, City went for crosses and crosses and then some more crosses. They attempted 38 in the match, with Kevin de Bruyne responsible for 16 of those. Of his 12 from open play, none found a team-mate. Erling Haaland had an off day and the service to him was also lacking, crosses overhit or underhit. And in this mode, City are not even good to watch.
Man Utd
Luke Shaw certainly picked a fine time to remind us that sometimes he can switch off at the most inopportune moments.
The 27-year-old was at fault for Fulham’s goal in Manchester United’s 2-1 victory at Craven Cottage, although the expression on his face as Daniel James found the net suggested that may be news to him.
James, the winger United sold on to Leeds last year, had only been on the pitch a matter of seconds before he was celebrating the first goal of his season-long loan spell, and it was Shaw’s negligence that made it possible.
A swift counter-attack down the left flank featuring the veteran legs of Willian unhinged United but Shaw had spotted that James intended to arrive at speed in the box and put on a spurt to draw level with his man in the danger zone.
Inexplicably, however, he then decided to put on the brakes, allowing James to step away for a simple close-range finish once Lisandro Martinez had failed to cut out the cross.
United supporters were left cursing the former Southampton man, who has recovered from both a badly broken leg and having his reputation trashed by Jose Mourinho to become No 1 pick not just for his club but also for his country.
For England fans the reaction was no doubt one of horror given that Shaw is the only fit out-and-out left back in Gareth Southgate’s pool for Qatar. James, of course, will be gunning for a repeat when the Three Lions take on Wales on 29 November in what is likely to be a Group B decider.
Newcastle
Newcastle’s night and day improvement over the past 12 months is no secret, but there is still merit in comparing and contrasting their drastic change in fortunes from then until now.
After their first 15 Premier League games of 2021-22, Newcastle had a solitary victory, taken 10 points in total and were being kept off the foot of the table by Norwich City. After 15 games of this season, they have won eight matches (losing only once), trebled their points tally to 30, are third in the table and sit two points behind Manchester City. If supporters spent last Christmas fretting about relegation, they can dream of Champions League football as they tuck into their Turkey dinners this year.
The obvious caveat to Newcastle’s transformation is that they have spent £215m on new players in 2022. And while Nick Pope, Kieran Trippier, Sven Botman, Dan Burn and Bruno Guimaraes were all central to Saturday’s win, it is the startling improvement of some of those that preceded the Public Investment Fund’s takeover that really highlights the best of Eddie Howe’s work.
Joe Willock was Newcastle’s match-winner against Chelsea; Miguel Almiron, the Premier League’s Player of the Month for October, set it up; Fabian Schar was a £3m centre-back when he signed from Deportivo La Coruna, but now looks like a £30m one; Joelinton has gone from being a non-scoring punchline to a midfield pressing monster.
And although Newcastle have invested heavily over the past two transfer windows, their expenditure in that period is still £60m less than Chelsea splurged this summer alone. On Saturday’s evidence, only one of those clubs has invested their sterling wisely and it isn’t the one with Raheem.
Nottingham Forest
After the summer Nottingham Forest had, the best they could have asked for was to be in touch with the pack when the league broke for the World Cup. You suspect that the club disagreed with that: impatient owners, a vast array of new signings, public statements of intent about thriving in the top flight. But they were wrong. You cannot build a new team and then attack the Premier League with gusto. If Forest did indeed need all (or even the majority) of those players, patience would be needed.
Steve Cooper has made it this far. It has never been plain sailing and it looked likely that he might lose his job six weeks ago, but instead a contract was signed and immediately that certainty appeared to help. Forest have given themselves a chance and the World Cup may well be better for them than any other club in the division (not least because only four outfield players are going to Qatar).
It goes beyond the new contract, though. Cooper’s change of system – from a back three to a 4-3-3 – has given much-needed protection to the central defenders and made Forest more secure at the back by losing a defender. Ryan Yates now gets to roam and fight fires, Remo Freuler plays passes and Cooper can pick either Cheikhou Kouyate or Lewis O’Brien depending on the fixture. Kouyate has been a brilliant signing.
The front three is more fluid – Cooper can either pick Taiwo Awoniyi to hold up the ball or a front three of diminutive counter attackers if that is the plan (as it was against Palace). But what is certainly becoming set in stone is the importance of Gibbs-White, who drops deep, drives forward, plays through balls and is now scoring goals too. We’re starting to see Jesse Lingard’s best form emerge too.
Forest are far from safe – they are still the favourites to finish bottom because of the chances they missed to extricate themselves from trouble; you don’t fail to beat Brentford, Bournemouth, Fulham, Leicester, Wolves and Brighton and give yourself an easy second half to the season. But they have a foothold, they have some form and they have bags of belief again. Now for everyone to beg the owners not to spaff money on six players in January and make the squad weird again.
Southampton
Nathan Jones, Premier League manager. You cannot doubt that the most overachieving head coach in the Championship over the last few years deserves his shot in the big time, but it’s also a significant gamble to appoint him given how badly it went the last time he swapped Luton for red-and-white stripes.
Listening to Jones in his early interviews, two things jump out: the amount of times he referenced that Southampton are committed to developing players and how often he pointed out that Ralph Hasenhuttl was given time to get it right.
On face value, both those things are accurate. Southampton spent the summer largely buying teenagers so we can assume they wish to pursue a “buy young, develop and sell high” model. Hasenhuttl was indeed given ample opportunities to turn the ship around and the club stuck with him through the nine-goal defeats. Jones presumably would appreciate the same leeway.
But did this not all sound a little defeatist? For all the commitment to the future, Southampton face an emergency situation in the present. You can admire the courage of the model if you wish, but surely nobody is foolish enough to ignore that Premier League broadcasting revenue helps to fund it?
Jones might well need time to perfect his methods, but he has five weeks to work on a half-baked version. Southampton play Brighton, Fulham, Nottingham Forest, Everton, Aston Villa, Brentford and Wolves in their first seven league games after the World Cup break. If the manager doesn’t hit the ground running, he’ll have one foot back in the Championship by February.
Tottenham
Whatever went wrong for Dejan Kulusevski and Rodrigo Bentancur at Juventus, Antonio Conte should thank his former employers for keeping him in a job. We have grown accustomed to Harry Kane and Son Heung-min’s combination making Spurs tick, but it’s Bentancur who is now their most important player and Kulusevski who makes Kane’s job so much easier.
Let’s start with Kulusevski, who has somehow returned from injury and instantly returned to his previous best without skipping a beat. The way in which his tall frame and slightly languid style suddenly shifts to this outrageously powerful – and yet still quick-footed – wide forward is basically impossible to stop unless you want to double-mark him and leave Kane with an easier job in the middle.
But Bentancur is now the heartbeat of this team, the man for every moment who is now coming up big whenever Conte needs him. It is Bentancur who wins the ball back (12 regains against Leeds, five more than any other Spurs player). It is Bentancur who plays probing passes rather than just shuttling the ball out to a full-back. It is Betancur who is now apparently a goalscorer too – he’s scored four goals from just 12 shots.
Neither me nor any sensible Spurs supporter is convinced that this team under Conte yet makes any real sense, but that only makes the contributions from the individuals more important. Now Conte has five weeks to work out why dropping Emerson Royal is probably best for everyone.
West Ham
A week ago, West Ham supporters left the London Stadium en masse with about 15 seconds of the game remaining, after Crystal Palace’s winner. Fair play to David Moyes and his team for thinking of them this weekend; Harvey Barnes’ goal allowed the fans to leave the stadium and spend five minutes waiting for the tube at Stratford before the final whistle.
This is going south pretty quickly. We have seen managers claw themselves back from the edge of their own unemployment this season (West Ham faced one of them on Saturday and lost to another at the City Ground in August), but West Ham appear to be so flat and Moyes apparently so ill-prepared to change the record that you do worry about his job.
European football has been very good to Moyes; no doubt. It provided a generation of supporters with the best footballing memories of their lives – Moyes will forever be thanked for that. But European progress is no easy substitute for league form and certainly not when the squad has been improved at your behest to fuel fights on multiple fronts. West Ham have taken 33 points from their last 32 league games. In that form, a club with aspirations of being the seventh best club in England are barely worthy of being in its top division.
That’s not even the most serious accusation against Moyes. Having demanded that the club bring new players who would allow this team to play in a number of different ways (and Moyes was perfectly entitled to expect this investment), West Ham have spent this season playing in exactly the same way as before with diminishing returns because the new players are not suited to it. Why ask Gianluca Scamacca to do the same role as Michail Antonio? Why play Lucas Paqueta as a No 10 if he’s going to be starved of the ball?
It doesn’t make much sense, and supporters are getting restless. You can make an argument that Moyes is being victimised for his own success, but West Ham finished seventh last season having juggled Europa League and Premier League football. There is simply no good excuse for them being 16th now.
Wolves
The second-lowest scorers of the 98 clubs in Europe’s “top five” divisions (they have Sampdoria to thank for keeping them off the bottom) and 20th in the Premier League table at Christmas. Wolves are in very real danger of joining the select group of clubs that “were too good to go down”.
Fans who watch this team week in and week out will probably contest that sentiment, but objectively there is plenty of talent in this squad. Ruben Neves would walk into the starting XI of every club in the division bar Manchester City and on current form, possibly Arsenal; Jose Sa was arguably the Premier League’s standout goalkeeper last season; Matheus Nunes, as commentators are contractually obligated to remind us, was once heralded “one of the best players in the world” by Pep Guardiola.
But after four largely successful years in the top-flight, Fosun’s Jorge Mendes project has undoubtedly stalled. Since beating Aston Villa 2-1 at the start of April, Wolves have won just two of their 22 league matches, taking 12 points from a possible 66. Extrapolating that rate over a 38-game campaign would leave them on 20 points, two fewer than Norwich ended up on in 2021-22.
Wolves had legitimate complaints over William Saliba’s last-man foul on Goncalo Guedes that went unpunished, but debatable refereeing decisions are not to blame for their current plight. Julen Lopetegui, paraded in front of the Molineux faithful before he begins work on Monday, has a big job on his hands to turn things around.
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