The Score is Daniel Storey’s weekly verdict on all 20 Premier League teams’ performances. Sign up here to receive the free newsletter every Monday morning
Arsenal’s funk lasted roughly three days as they seized a new initiative in the title race by twice coming from behind to beat Aston Villa, while Manchester City were held by Nottingham Forest.
We have thoughts on Arsenal’s resilience and City’s tendency to concede from lots of their shots on targets faced. Speaking of goalkeepers, there’s love for Neto at Bournemouth but not Danny Ward at Leicester.
Elsewhere, Manchester United are the substitute kings, while Brentford know how to stay in games and David Moyes’ West Ham are barely trying to get into them in the first place.
This weekend’s results
Saturday 18 February
- Aston Villa 2-4 Arsenal
- Brentford 1-1 Crystal Palace
- Brighton 0-1 Fulham
- Chelsea 0-1 Southampton
- Everton 1-0 Leeds
- Nottingham Forest 1-1 Man City
- Wolves 0-1 Bournemouth
- Newcastle 0-2 Liverpool
Sunday 19 February
- Man Utd 3-0 Leicester
- Tottenham 2-0 West Ham
Arsenal
One of the indirect impacts of the World Cup break in November is that it gives the false impression that we are entering the home straight of the season. We cannot quite grasp that Arsenal still have 40 per cent of their league campaign to play. Dropped points in February, even against your title rivals, are never going to be definitive. Unlike in previous seasons, neither side looks capable of a long streak of victories. Perfection will not be necessary.
Instead, it is important how you respond to adversity. Following three straight league games without a win, and having twice fallen behind in the first half, Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal faced a monumentally important 45 minutes. By all accounts, Arteta read the riot act at half-time. And somehow, some way, Arsenal got it done.
“It was so important for us to be back on track,” Oleksandr Zinchenko said after the game. “It’s not just about points and the table. It’s about the rhythm and our mood in the dressing room and the training ground. We just need to keep fighting until the very end.”
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The Emirates is a fortress that could win Arsenal the title - it's become as key as any player11 February, 2023Those final words from Zinchenko are prescient, given the manner of Arsenal’s victory. Between November 2017 and the beginning of 2023, Arsenal won only two Premier League matches with goals in stoppage time. Coincidentally, both of those matches had similarities with Saturday: an own goal by a goalkeeper against Wolves in 2022 and two goals in stoppage time against Crystal Palace in May 2021.
Since the start of this year, Arsenal have equalled that total by beating Manchester United and Villa with goals after the 90th minute. Is there any one sign of being a champion team? No. Is this a very handy habit to pick up? You bet.
Aston Villa
There will be many, particularly those of a French disposition, who might have allowed themselves a wry smile on Saturday afternoon as Emi Martinez was punched in the gut by karma. Martinez’s gloating after the World Cup final, including the taunting of Kylian Mbappe, left a sour taste after a wonderful denouement to the tournament.
Martinez is also an effective exponent of dark arts at club level. Someone has probably already calculated exactly how many minutes of Saturday’s game was spent with him time-wasting, but we can be sure that it factored in the strength of Arsenal’s celebrations. Jorginho’s shot deflecting back off Martinez was nothing but rotten luck, but fortune does tend to find a way to make peace with itself.
At that point, Martinez basically played for himself. After the game, Unai Emery admitted that he was a little annoyed that his goalkeeper had gone up for the corner, because that is not something he likes his keepers to do (and Martinez had certainly not been given permission): “I have never told my ‘keeper to go forward. It’s not the spirit. We have to keep our mind clear and be smart. Not like that. I have never told my ‘keeper to do it.”
It might not seem like a big deal (he tried something and it didn’t work – so what?) but that is exactly the type of incident that really grinds a manager’s gears. Arsenal going down the other end to make it 4-2 is unlikely to have improved Emery’s mood.
Bournemouth
Their first away points in more than four months and a first away clean sheet of the season to make it a potentially season-changing Saturday for Bournemouth. Last week, we wondered whether the addition of attacking players, combining with Dominic Solanke’s return, might make Bournemouth dangerous enough to overcome their defensive fragility. In fact, the opposite: Bournemouth scored with their only shot on target and then defended superbly during the final 20 minutes.
That’s even more significant, because the suspicion is that those struggling teams who are capable of making themselves more watertight will be the ones who are most likely to survive the drop. Look at the evidence: Steve Cooper has dramatically improved Forest’s defensive record. Sean Dyche will probably continue to do the same at Everton, Southampton stopped Chelsea scoring on Saturday. Leeds have kept one clean sheet in their last 10 games and are getting worse.
For Bournemouth, the great hope is that they are in a false position because of the time that Neto missed through injury. If clean sheets are going to be important, it is instructive that Neto has played 13 league games this season and has conceded only 14 goals; Bournemouth conceded 30 goals in the other 10. It produces the following pleasing (unless you’re Mark Travers) statistic: Neto has the best save percentage of any Premier League goalkeeper this season; Travers has the worst. Sometimes it really is that simple.
Brentford
It’s a mark of Brentford’s progress that they can avoid defeat against an established Premier League team and it can legitimately feel like disappointment and two points dropped. Brentford are halfway through their second top-flight season in 75 years, scored a last-minute equaliser and some will have left the ground a bit miffed that the gap to the European places has grown.
Thomas Frank’s team are also now on an unbeaten run of 11 Premier League matches. To put that consistency into perspective, no other team in England’s top flight has gone more than three games without defeat. And this is supposedly normal now.
What defines Brentford over that run – and indeed all season – is their ability to grind out results. They have lost four times in the league, the same number as Manchester City. They have certainly not played well in all those matches – against Leeds and Forest away and Palace and Wolves at home, Brentford failed to register more xG than their opponent – but Frank’s simple principle is that his team proves its mettle in such circumstances and if you aren’t going to win, make sure you don’t lose.
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That is where they have improved so much in their second season. In 2021-22, seven draws and 18 defeats. This season, they are on course for 18 draws and seven defeats. That is a wonderful satisfying statistical nugget (and Frank probably approves too).
Brighton
Roberto de Zerbi is the latest Premier League manager to vent about refereeing. Brighton’s manager was shown a red card after the final whistle for his protestations and then continued in his post-match interviews.
“I told the referee this week, we had a meeting with his boss and I lost time in my work, in my job because I think the level of refereeing in the Premier League is very bad,” De Zerbi said. “I lost two hours, three hours with him. I want to be clear. If you want to come to me to have a meeting and if you want to lose two hours of my time, of my work, you have to have another, a different attitude on the pitch.
“If you are a referee and I’m a coach. If you want to improve, if you want to improve our work in football, they have to be with another attitude. I don’t want to speak about a particular situation, it was a penalty, other things. I’m speaking only of attitude.”
You’ll be pleased to know that the officials didn’t make a mistake on Saturday. De Zerbi may still be annoyed about last weekend [and fair enough] and supporters will lap them up, of course. But those comments are deeply unhelpful.
Chelsea
This can’t just go on forever unabated. We can understand that this was intended as a long-term appointment, understand that Graham Potter is a coach who builds slowly over time and, when he gets the buy-in of his players, creates something special. But if things start particularly badly, there comes a point when you wonder if it will always go badly.
What we’re really talking about here is “the fit”. Just because you fail somewhere doesn’t make you a bad coach (if you have proven yourself elsewhere); just because you succeed somewhere doesn’t make you right for every job. We have just seen at Southampton how quickly it can become very obvious that persevering beyond reason only exacerbates your original mistake.
Since Potter was appointed, Chelsea have taken 21 points from 17 league matches. They have exactly the same record over that period as Nottingham Forest and 11 clubs in the league have taken more. Since the return from the World Cup, his points-per-game record has actually got worse. The Southampton defeat was painful, a collection of individuals unable to work together as a team to create chances of significance against arguably the worst team in the division.
Again, this isn’t really on Potter. He had his strengths but walked into a club that was just recovering from a summer frenzy under a new owner desperate to impress. Potter stressed the need for stability and then watched on as Todd Boehly made things more manic and the squad more weird. This isn’t Championship Manager 01-02; you can’t just buy 14 players, set the tactics and watch them go.
But then we’re back to “fit” again. If this was the most expensive hospital pass in history, there are managers who would have made a better fist of it until now and there are managers who would be better suited for the same gig from now onwards. So what was the point in appointing Potter if you were going to make the job harder for him? And what’s the point in keeping him if it’s not going to get any easier?
Crystal Palace
“I wasn’t worried before the game and I’m not worried now,” says Crystal Palace manager Patrick Vieira, which is a lovely sentiment but I’m not totally convinced it is shared by supporters. For now, Palace are trapped in this weird mid-table vortex: they have won one league game since 6 November and yet only dropped from 10th to 12th in the table. But that won’t hold for long if results don’t improve. There are now five clubs below them within five points of them.
And for all that Vieira says he isn’t worried, just look at how much he’s chopping and changing in search of an answer that he’s struggling to find. Palace have now played three different formations in their last three games – 4-2-3-1, 4-3-3 and 4-4-2 – and still can’t win.
Extend that further and the only consistency is inconsistency. In their last eight league games, Vieira has started with:
- 4-3-3 with Zaha as the central one of the three
- 4-2-3-1 with Zaha as the striker
- 4-2-3-1 with Ayew as the striker
- 4-2-3-1 with Mateta as the striker
- 4-2-3-1 with Edouard as the striker
- 4-3-3 with Ayew as the central one of the three
- 4-4-2 with Mateta and Ayew as the two strikers
Given that Vieira has now been at Palace for 18 months and all of these players have been at the club for at least a year, it’s extraordinary that there is still so much upheaval to find the right solution.
Everton
It’s all coming together nicely. Everton will need to attack with greater cohesion than this – and play better too – if they are to survive with any great ease, but in two home games, both clean sheets, Sean Dyche has proven why he was such a good fit for this short-term job. It’s not particularly pretty. It’s also not as ugly as a club being relegated because their owners made a hundred bad decisions and considered themselves above a very good Premier League coach.
All of the simple principles are there: the back-post set pieces that teams repeatedly struggle to cope with; the focus on maintaining a strong spine and rolling the dice out wide; the home clean sheets as the fuel for increasing confidence for better performances away from home. We cannot overlook how rotten Leeds were, but Everton allowed their opponents an xG of 0.5 or below for the first time in the league this season.
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Dyche is also using his full-backs as attacking weapons, something that was a little underappreciated at Burnley. By using a combative midfield three that spreads out across the pitch, Dyche asks the two full-backs to push high up the pitch. This isn’t always to play an active part in the attack (although Seamus Coleman got the winner this week), but creates the overlap that affords the two wingers just enough time and space to provide accurate crosses. On Saturday, Dwight McNeil and Alex Iwobi provided 21 crosses between them. That will become an even more sensible strategy when Dominic Calvert-Lewin returns.
Fulham
It does feel like we are simply picking a different Fulham player every week to pour praise on, and this time it’s Issa Diop’s turn. Diop endured an odd time at West Ham: incredibly highly-rated when he joined, excellent for the opening months and then dropping in and out of the team, occasionally flashing but eventually sliding down the pecking order and out of the first-team picture.
With Tim Ream the staple and the defensive leader, Marco Silva can pick either Tosin Adarabioyo or Diop next to him. The benefit of Diop is that, as well as the “proper” defensive stuff (he wins tackles and makes interceptions at a faster rate than Ream), he’s also brilliant when stepping out from the back. There is a measure for this: progressive distance, which calculates how far a player carries the ball forward with their feet per 90 minutes played. Not only does Diop carry the ball more than double the distance of Adarabioyo, he carries it further than any other player in the team.
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Diop broke into Silva’s team regularly after the sticky run when Fulham conceded seven goals in two games against Newcastle as West Ham. They have now conceded three goals in their last seven league games alongside Ream. For £15m, they have signed a 26-year-old central defender with experience in England who didn’t even have to move cities.
Leeds
This could escalate very quickly indeed. Leeds were not just bad against Everton; they produced their worst performance of the season and arguably their worst since promotion. They have been beaten more heavily, of course. But the combination of a total lack of cohesion in midfield, the inability to create a decent chance for Patrick Bamford and the inevitability of Everton’s winner made this one sting.
There were some positive vibes directed towards Michael Skubala prior to this weekend. It was not really his fault that Leeds were in the mess, supporters had made their feelings clear about the potential appointment of Alfred Schreuder and Skubala had got a reaction during the double header against Manchester United. The majority decision, at least amongst Leeds supporters online, seemed to lean towards giving the caretaker the rest of the season. That, presumably, has changed given how bad Leeds were against Everton.
Supporters are fickle, we know this. That isn’t a criticism, merely reflective of the lurches in emotion that football fandom drives. But that’s why clubs require strong leadership to offer perspective, logic and futureproof planning. The reason that fans were chanting “Sack the board” at Goodison isn’t because they were losing again. It’s because Leeds’ decision makers appear to have been completely caught out by a situation that was predictable to the point of inevitability.
“I don’t have any doubt that we’ll avoid a situation similar to last season – it’s impossible,” were the now infamous words of chairman Andrea Radrizzani last summer. That pride before the fall looks spectacularly dim given what followed.
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But it’s not just failing to predict the struggle of this season; it’s wholly failing to react while it was happening. When Jesse Marsch was finally sacked, every Leeds fan had been waiting weeks for it. It was only the victory at Anfield in October, after four league defeats on the spin, that earned him a stay of execution.
Yet when Marsch finally was sacked, much to the joy of those supporters, there was apparently no plan for his replacement worked out. Several managers were spoken to, some of whom seemed less than keen on taking it and others who Leeds chose not to pursue. But we’re now a fortnight down the road and we are no closer to knowing who will replace Skubala or whether it’s his job to lose.
Leicester
He has been greatly improved in recent weeks, largely because Leicester have protected him pretty well, but Danny Ward’s work on Manchester United’s first and second goals will again raise questions of whether he is an adequate replacement for Kasper Schmeichel at Leicester.
Ward was put into a difficult position by two nonsensical Leicester offside traps, but a goalkeeper’s one job when facing a one-one-one is to try and a) make themselves bigger and b) to avoid committing themselves and thus force the striker to make a decision (and so create doubt). You stay on your feet, crouched down, arms wide – we all know the drill.
For the first goal, Ward seemed to get his angles slightly wrong because he left Rashford almost half of the goal to aim at. For the second goal, I can’t work it out at all. As Rashford shoots, Ward seems to fling himself into the air but low to the ground and so the ball goes through him. On both occasions, Ward becomes smaller, not bigger. David De Gea showed him the textbook example of how to do it; Ward didn’t follow it.
Liverpool
Two wins in a week and their first clean sheet away from home since September to put a pep (maybe choose a different word) in Jurgen Klopp’s step ahead of Real Madrid in midweek. The win over Newcastle was barely convincing after the first 20 minutes, particularly given Alisson was probably man of the match and Liverpool conceded more shots than they took with a man advantage, but the headline is that Liverpool are back in a top four race that we’ve been ruling them out of for the best part of three months.
If Alisson was the game’s best player, Stefan Bajcetic is Liverpool’s feel-good story. For all that supporters were – and are – desperate for new midfielders, sometimes the best way of freshening things up is to give a young academy kid (albeit one who only joined that academy in 2020) the chance to play with a little freedom. Not only has Bajcetic looked remarkably mature, that also rubs off on those around him.
There was a perfect moment against Newcastle to epitomise Bajcetic’s impact since stepping into the Liverpool team. Alisson rolled a pass out to Virgil van Dijk, who was actually under a little more pressure than both he and his goalkeeper had realised. Van Dijk’s only option was into the feet of Bajcetic, who was also under pressure with his back to goal. We have seen players caught in this position recently – Rodri and Boubacar Kamara both cost their teams goals by dwelling on the ball or playing blind passes.
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Bajcetic did neither. Instead, he invited pressure to make his opponent sprint towards him at full pace. At that point, rather than controlling the ball, Bajcetic opened up his body, allowed the ball to deflect off his foot but never stop still, beat his man and opened up the pitch. Several seconds later, Liverpool had a 2-0 lead.
I’m not saying that no other Liverpool midfielder would have done that; that’s just hyperbole. But there is an insouciance in technically gifted, young midfielders that makes that type of move so instinctive. Now does Klopp stick with him against Real Madrid?
Man City
Pep Guardiola is right that his team dominated the entire game against Forest and that it was their profligacy in front of goal that cost them a comfortable victory. Forest supporters have seen Erling Haaland’s dad score harder chances than the one he missed in the second half when blazing over Keylor Navas’ bar.
But City also have a problem with conceding goals from precious few chances. Only two regular goalkeepers (Mark Travers and Southampton’s Gavin Bazunu) have lower save percentages than Ederson this season and that problem is getting worse. City have faced 14 shots on target in total over their last eight league games. Eight of those 14 shots on target have gone into the goal.
This isn’t just on Ederson, who certainly can’t be blamed for Forest’s equaliser. Instead it is representative of a trend that is deeply annoying for Guardiola. City are so dominant that subconscious complacency becomes unavoidable. And on those occasions when they miss chance after chance but continue to dominate possession, opposition teams begin to believe that one move might be enough to sneak a point or three.
Man Utd
Do you remember when Manchester United’s squad looked so tepid and so uninspiring that you looked towards the bench and saw almost nothing to inspire you? You really should remember, because it was less than 12 months ago and Ralf Rangnick was manager.
One of the most obvious impacts of an excellent coaching appointment that improves the cohesion of the team, the results and with it the morale is that the competition for places naturally increases without the personnel changing that much. On Sunday, Jadon Sancho scored for United after coming on as a sub. That was the ninth goal by a Manchester United substitute in the Premier League this season. That’s more than any other team.
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Newcastle
How much will Nick Pope wish that he could have his time again? The rush of blood that followed the slip, the fractions of a second during which instinct rushes in and sense cannot take over in time, will cause him to miss the first major final of his career. Eddie Howe tried to claim that Pope should only have been awarded a yellow card (and fair play for doing it with a straight face) but that is nonsense.
That gives Newcastle a headache ahead of next weekend. Their second-choice goalkeeper is Martin Dubravka, but Dubravka only returned from a loan spell at Manchester United in January and he played for them in the EFL Cup. He is therefore cup-tied for next weekend.
Howe therefore will be choosing between Loris Karius and Mark Gillespie. Karius’ last competitive appearance was for Union Berlin against Hoffenheim in February 2021. Gillespie’s last game was before that, an EFL Cup tie against Newport County in September 2020. The manager says both are ready; I don’t think anyone can say that with any certainty.
Howe will be equally worried about an attack that has begun to flicker between lethargy and profligacy in recent weeks – it’s three goals in seven league games. Alexander Isak is still settling in thanks to his injury issues, while Anthony Gordon has still not started a match for his new club following his January move. It would be a surprise if that first start cam at Wembley.
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In fact, against Liverpool we saw a return to old Newcastle, namely a team whose best moments came via the individual brilliance of Allan Saint-Maximin taking on – and beating – players. A return to form for Saint-Maximin would be welcomed by Howe and every supporter, but Newcastle’s excellence this season has been founded upon the strength of the team over the individual. I’m not sure it’s a great sign that he’s come back to the fore like this.
Nottingham Forest
This is a Morgan Gibbs-White and Brennan Johnson appreciation zone. Watch back that equaliser against Manchester City to understand why these two are so crucial to Forest’s chances of staying up. They dovetail beautifully, they understand where each other’s runs will take them and therefore where the passes should be played. See how often they occupy a small area of space and yet never get in each other’s way.
Gibbs-White might well be close to an England call-up, such has been his consistency in difficult circumstances this season. He has been responsible for 72 shot-creating actions, which measures the number of times he has played a pass or beaten a man that has resulted in a shot. That total is the highest of any player in the bottom half of the Premier League bar James Ward-Prowse, whose numbers are understandably assisted by his magnificent set-piece taking.
Now, as ever, the task for Steve Cooper is to get his attacking pair working closely together away from home. If Gibbs-White and Johnson enjoy possession on the counter enough times, they can do damage to any opponent.
Southampton
We never thought that David Beckham’s Premier League free-kick record would be broken, even when Beckham left for France, USA, Italy and Spain. James Ward-Prowse needs one more. Beckham was a brand, a superstar who never forgot the importance of repeated practice and hard work. Ward-Prowse is no superstar; but he is equal to Beckham in every other way with a dead ball at his feet.
Like Beckham, the greatness of Ward-Prowse’s free-kick shooting lies in how it reduces the battle to only two elements: him and the ball. The goalkeeper, the defensive wall, the opposition manager – all of them know what Ward-Prowse is trying to do and yet they have been unable to stop it. If he places the ball in a part of the goal with the trajectory and pace he is after, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
Finally – and again, like Beckham – watch how often a Ward-Prowse free-kick goes into the very top corner of the goal: almost never. That is the beauty of their technique. They do not require the unpredictability of the knuckleball and they do not need to get it into a small spot of the goal. If you get enough whip on the shot, sending it just over the head of the jumping wall, there is a massive area to aim at.
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One option that gets touted is to put a defender on the line and have the goalkeeper cover the other side of the goal. Which is fine, other than it would also allow attackers to crowd the box in front of the goalkeeper without being offside. You might stop Ward-Prowse scoring in the same way, but I’m not sure you neutralise the general threat.
Tottenham
I’m prepared to believe that Emerson Royal is an experiment in trolling. He spends most of this season frustrating Tottenham supporters with his own displays and because of Antonio Conte’s refusal to give Djed Spence a chance. Then Spence and Matt Doherty leave and Tottenham agree to spend £40m on Pedro Porro, the wing-back that Conte is craving.
So far, so normal. But then Royal, fresh from seeing Porro come in to replace him, suddenly begins playing like Cafu. He’s charging up the pitch like a man running to cash in a winning lottery ticket. He’s playing give-and-go passes and overlapping Dejan Kulusevski. He’s scoring goals. He’s… defending really well and never getting caught out of position?
And so now Tottenham have a £40m right wing-back who struggled on his debut and is now legitimately behind Royal on form. The trick now is to wait until Porro gets deflated by his lack of minutes, at which point Royal can tail off badly again.
West Ham
I think I’ve been duped. I got sucked into thinking that West Ham had escaped trouble. I’ve checked and it turns out all that happened was them beating a Frank Lampard Everton team and League One Derby County in the FA Cup. West Ham were indeed better when drawing at Newcastle and at home to Chelsea, but then the teams around them have started picking up points.
After the defeat to Tottenham, Declan Rice described how low the dressing room was and accepted that West Ham were in a relegation fight. That’s no longer a secret; they’re third from bottom and don’t have any games in hand. The home game against Nottingham Forest next weekend is huge – they would be eight points behind Forest if they lost.
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For all that Moyes appeared to have improved the mood a little, West Ham have won one of their last 11 league games and they have taken six from a possible 24 since the World Cup. Sunday was arguably the nadir of the season, given that they had enjoyed a free midweek and their opponents had lost in Milan. They offered next to nothing, instead waiting for a mediocre opponent to eventually break them down.
Moyes’ West Ham appear to be governed by fear. They commit too few players forward and so damage the confidence of the forwards they do have. They are formulaic. They scored 60 league goals last season, spent £160m on new players and have scored 19 goals in 23 league games this season. It’s a large enough sample size to conclude that they will not be prolific again. How much longer does Moyes get if the slide continues?
Wolves
A defeat that we can roughly subtitle as The Tale Of Two Matheus’. We’ll start with Nunes, who is an excellent midfielder but is not a defence protector. Nunes would probably be more effective in Joao Moutinho’s role as the central midfielder in front of the two, but picking him and Ruben Neves next to each other means your midfield loses much-needed bite. Exhibit A: Nunez won possession three times in an hour on Saturday. Mario Lemina won it four times the week before and he was sent off after 26 minutes.
And then there’s Matheus Cunha, the £43m striker signing who, erm… isn’t a striker? Cunha has had 212 non-penalty shots in his league career at four different clubs. He’s scored 18 goals from those shots at a rate of one goal every 11.8 shots. To put that into some context, the Premier League player with the most similar record to that this season is Fred.
One option is surely to play a front two? Cunha’s best asset seems to be linking up with a teammate but he struggles when he gets isolated. Wolves used a front two against Liverpool in a 3-0 win and Julen Lopetegui has since abandoned it for either a 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1. Start Adama Traore on the right of a 4-4-2 with Cunha off Raul Jimenez and see if that works. It has to be worth a go, given – as broadcaster and Wolves fan Jacqui Oatley pointed out this weekend – no Wolves striker has scored in their last 33 matches.
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