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
Newcastle showed they are everything that Tottenham are not as the race for the top four steered dramatically off script.
A welcome bit of perspective for Arsenal fans, who watched their title hopes suffer another setback as Manchester City rack up the games in hand.
At the other end of the table, West Ham have finally clicked – albeit too late to save David Moyes in the long run – and Crystal Palace picked up another point to plunge Everton into further trouble.
This weekend’s results
- Arsenal 3-3 Southampton
- Fulham 2-1 Leeds
- Brentford 1-1 Aston Villa
- Crystal Palace 0-0 Everton
- Leicester 2-1 Wolves
- Liverpool 3-2 Nottingham Forest
- Bournemouth 0-4 West Ham
- Newcastle 6-1 Tottenham
Arsenal
Mikel Arteta is right that several of his players are making foolish mistakes. In their last three matches, Arsenal have produced a weird blend of defensive slackness and attacking panic, all blanketed by a complacency at inopportune moments. We saw that at both ends of the draw against Southampton: Aaron Ramsdale’s loose pass in the first minute and Thomas Partey’s inexplicable decision to shoot from 30 yards rather than passing to Martin Odegaard at the end.
At a push, you could praise Arsenal for their resilience on Friday night to come back from two goals down. But they have ceded the advantage in the title race during wild periods of each of their last three matches. Now they must surely go to the Etihad on Wednesday evening and win or avoid Manchester City eventually storming clear.
And there is something that Arteta and Arsenal supporters must face: this has been coming. Incredibly, they have now conceded more goals at home in the Premier League than four of the bottom seven in the Premier League – Nottingham Forest, Everton, Leicester and Crystal Palace. Drill down a little further and you see the point.
Before the World Cup break, Arsenal allowed an expected goals total greater than 1.0 in five of their 14 league games. Since the World Cup, it’s 12 in 18. They are allowing more shots and allowing them closer to their own goal.
That has now been exacerbated, or perhaps just exposed, by the recent raft of injuries. It isn’t just that William Saliba is better than Rob Holding and Granit Xhaka is far more capable than Fabio Vieira, whose signing looks like an expensive misstep. It’s that the players around them – Gabriel, Partey, Odegaard – seem far less comfortable without their usual teammates. Is that one of the issues with a distinct lack of rotation this season?
Aston Villa
Manchester City are good at scoring goals, on that we can all agree. This season, they have scored goals in 10 consecutive league games, nine league games and 10 league games. Last season, they scored in 18 straight league games and, in 2019-20, they had a streak of 16 league games. Their record under Pep Guardiola is 22 league games, set in 2018-19.
Why are we discussing this? Because, on Saturday, Aston Villa scored against Brentford just as they have scored in every single one of Unai Emery’s league games in charge. Their streak stands at 19, three off Guardiola’s record at City and more than City have managed since 2018-19.
Now clearly scoring in every game isn’t the only – or even the best – way of judging a team (we tend to do that with results, funnily enough). But given that Emery took over in midseason and inherited a side that had scored seven in their 11 league games this season under Steven Gerrard, it demonstrates just how quickly and effectively Emery has rebuilt Villa’s attack with Ollie Watkins as the focal point and Emi Buendia as the creator.
Bournemouth
Look, there’s no reason to panic yet because you cannot undo good work in one afternoon and Bournemouth’s fine run was always going to end at some point. But if there was a good way of hammering home the point that Bournemouth are not safe yet, it is getting pumped 4-0 at home by a team who were below them in the table.
Now here’s the thing: Bournemouth still have three games to play against other teams that are below them: Leeds at home and Everton and Southampton away. Gary O’Neil’s team have been routinely excellent against the bottom five clubs in the division, taking 13 points from a possible 21. But this is really not the time to lose that habit. Bournemouth are going to have a say in the relegation battle one way or another. They just don’t want to become part of it again.
Brentford
You know how it goes: you try to work out how smartly run clubs like Brentford and Brighton are going to improve over the summer and you quickly work out that they have already got it mapped out and they’re running six months ahead of schedule.
In January, Brentford announced the loan signing of Kevin Schade from Freiburg. He was a 21-year-old academy graduate who had bags of pace, a nose for being in the right place at the right time (you’re going to have to ignore the open-goal miss for now) and is never happier than when making a full-back look foolish. Ashley Young will have easier days between now and his retirement.
Thomas Frank has taken time to acclimate Schade into his team. Saturday was just his fourth league start, but then he’s still young and Brentford are in the envious position of being comfortable in mid-table and therefore able to plan these things perfectly. Frank will expect hard work as standard – it was interesting that Schade won possession more than any other Brentford player against Villa.
I know the focus will be on a dreadful open goal miss, but Schade looks a fine talent and Brentford have surely stolen a march on clubs across Europe. The loan deal includes an option to buy for a reported £21m and it seems likely that Brentford will make the move permanent. That also reflects a club entering a new age – this would be a club record fee.
Brighton
No league game due to FA Cup semi-finals.
Chelsea
No league game due to FA Cup semi-finals.
Crystal Palace
Roy Hodgson loves Jordan Ayew. A 0-0 draw at home to Everton isn’t cause for any great celebration (although how good is it that the results don’t really matter anymore?) but Hodsgon picked out his teacher’s pet for special praise.
“If you were going to pick one player out apart from that, it would definitely be Jordan for his desire, his work rate, but also his determination – he won more challenges, more duels, and there was no way anyone would get the better of Jordan. That hopefully rubbed off on some of the other players, too.”
It’s not just Ayew’s work without the ball that is helping Palace out – he’s become significantly more active around the penalty area. In the 11 league games before Hodgson was reappointed, Ayew was involved in 14 shot-creating actions; it’s 10 in Hodgson’s four games. He is taking on players and then looking to provide crosses or pull-backs into the penalty area.
And just look at the difference in Ayew’s shooting numbers. Under Patrick Vieira, Ayew had basically been sacrificed as a forward who got into the penalty area – he had taken only two shots in those 11 league games. Now Hodgson is encouraging him to get forward and take shots. He has had 11 in Hodgson’s four games and had more than any other Palace player against Everton.
Everton
This might seem an odd thing to mention after one of the dullest matches of this Premier League season, but this might be the afternoon on which Everton’s season finally changed. Supporters have become increasingly frustrated with Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s ongoing injury issues, but he started a match for the first time since 4 January and only the tenth time this season.
Given that Everton’s top scorers are Dwight McNeil and Demarai Gray on four each, and how much Sean Dyche craves a tall centre forward to cross the ball into (he made Chris Wood a consistently prolific goalscorer in the Premier League), the fitness of Calvert-Lewin could be a game changer for Everton.
It’s also an interesting theme within the relegation battle this season. As well as Calvert-Lewin coming back, Taiwo Awoniyi is back fit and starting for Nottingham Forest, Patrick Bamford came off the bench for Leeds and will be their great hope from now until May and Diego Costa is, against all expectation, Wolves’ best option. Add in Carlos Alcaraz finding his feet at Southampton and we have a relegation fight that might come down to which strikers can go on a run.
Fulham
We haven’t discussed him much recently because his excellence has very quickly become normalised, but it’s a fitting time to talk about Joao Palhinha again after a weekend on which he made six tackles against Leeds, three more than any of his teammates.
That’s because it takes Palhinha to 114 tackles in the Premier League this season, despite him missing three matches. That’s significant because it takes the Portuguese midfielder past Christian Norgaard’s total from last season (109) and Luke Ayling’s total from the season before (108).
Yes, with seven games of their league season remaining, Palhinha has already made more tackles than anyone in a single season since 2019-20. Which is pretty extraordinary.
Leeds
It’s not that Illan Meslier doesn’t make lots of saves. It’s not that he is well-protected by his defence. It’s not that he is even Leeds’ biggest problem, because there’s a long list of nominees for that dishonour. It’s just that more than half of the goals Leeds have conceded this season leave you mulling the following: “Should the goalkeeper have done a little better there?”
Harry Wilson’s goal on Saturday was a perfect example. Max Wober should do better to stop the cross coming into the box, thus exposing Meslier. But Leeds’ goalkeeper should also do better than palming the ball out for Wilson to lash home. It’s not a calamitous error, of course, but when they are repeated over a sustained period it does raise questions.
And although there is sympathy with Meslier for the sheer number of shots he is facing, the data suggests that he is struggling. Post-shot expected goals is a statistic we’ve used before in this column, but refers to the amount of goals you would “expect” a goalkeeper to save based on the quality of chances they have faced. It is not foolproof, obviously, but does offer a guide.
Before Saturday, Meslier had a post-shot expected goals figure of 47.9. He had conceded 60 goals. Only Gavin Bazunu in the Premier League has a worse record. It is a problem that Leeds could really do without.
Leicester City
It’s a bit much to say that this couldn’t have happened under Brendan Rodgers. Leicester’s last two league wins under Rodgers came when Leicester conceded the first goal, after all (against Aston Villa and Tottenham). But that’s not the point. Watch the way Dean Smith and his staff embraced at full-time and listen to the way the King Power erupted and stayed with the team from the equaliser onwards. Sometimes a change is worth it in and of itself.
Smith clearly feels the same about his team. The intriguing aspect of his brief time in charge is how willing he has been to bring in players who had fallen down the pecking order under Rodgers. Smith reasons that those fringe players might have something to prove and getting a reaction from them will give a kick to those players who might have got a little complacent and allowed their form to suffer as a result.
The starting XI against Wolves contained four examples. Mateus Tete has been a little in and out of the team recently and his form has been erratic. Jamie Vardy has started only 15 league matches this season (but won the penalty). Caglar Soyuncu’s time at Leicester seemed to have come to an end in January, but a move away fell through and he is back in the team at the expense of January signing Harry Souttar. Soyuncu was back to his bullying, physical best against Wolves.
But the best choice was to recall Boubakary Soumare for just his second league start since 3 January. Last week, we discussed how the slump in Wilfred Ndidi’s defensive output would have to change if Leicester were to stay up. The other option is to drop Ndidi and play with Soumare, who won possession nine times and was probably the game’s best player. That fresh way of viewing familiar problems is what appointing a new manager can do.
Liverpool
Trent Alexander-Arnold officially has a new position. It was in September 2021 that Jurgen Klopp publicly questioned Gareth Southgate playing Alexander-Arnold as a central midfielder – he was not subtle.
“Why would you make the best right-back in the world a midfielder? I don’t understand that really. As if the right-back position is not as important as the others. People who say that I struggle to understand how you could think that.”
Fast forward 18 months and Alexander-Arnold’s form as a right-back has led to a shift into a hybrid role where he is definitely operating in central midfield. It gives him more responsibility to create (four assists in the last two games) and also doesn’t make Liverpool much worse defensively because he can sit as a holding midfielder, pushed out right, when possession is lost. Goals may have come down Alexander-Arnold’s flank, but Liverpool’s bigger problem has been a vulnerability to the counter attack.
Against Forest, Alexander-Arnold actually played a third role. Because Liverpool had so much of the ball, and because Fabinho and Jordan Henderson were both offering protection, Alexander-Arnold basically played as a hybrid central midfielder-right winger. Often he started in the middle and then made runs wide that allowed him and Mohamed Salah to double up on Renan Lodi.
Klopp is at pains to say that Alexander-Arnold’s new role is not set in stone, but a) it’s working now and b) it reflects a general shift in the full-back role. Between Him, Oleksandr Zinchenko at Arsenal and Rico Lewis/John Stones at Manchester City, this is the age of super club hybrid full-back.
Man City
No league game due to FA Cup semi-finals.
Man Utd
No league game due to FA Cup semi-finals.
Newcastle
Much of the post-match focus was inevitably pointed at Tottenham’s great lament, but in many ways this was Newcastle’s breakout day. Defeat at Aston Villa had created a window of opportunity for the chasing pack below the top four, with Tottenham the prime candidate despite themselves. Had Newcastle lost on Sunday, the sense that a season was unravelling again in the final straight would have been inescapable.
Instead, Newcastle produced a domineering, bullying, ruthless attacking display that broke Tottenham’s spirit and broke their soul. If there has been a better 25 minutes produced by any Premier League attack this season, I wasn’t there to witness it. They understood that Spurs may be frail and creaking and they knocked them clean off their feet.
The questions over Newcastle United’s ownership are not going away and nor should they; state ownership is a stain on our game and the gymnastics around the approval of the Saudi takeover provoke continued questions given the LIV Golf court hearings.
To answer the inevitable replies for supporters: yes we do react in the same way when it’s Manchester City or Manchester United. You just didn’t take as much notice then because it wasn’t your club.
But outside that context, this has still been a remarkable season that will now end in Champions League football next season. PIF have not yet fully flexed their mighty financial muscle, although they will. The squad that Eddie Howe has managed to a top-four place is not top-four quality. It is a result of his exceptional man management and the creation of a special mood amongst supporters that has rushed into every crack and set like concrete.
And so the embodiment of this team is not Alexander Isak, Bruno Guimaraes or Sven Botman, new arrivals who will form the spine of next season’s Champions League team. It is Jacob Murphy, signed in 2017, loaned to West Bromwich Albion and Sheffield Wednesday (without much success) and never quite fitting in until Howe arrived. Now he’s a creative force and a goalscoring winger for a top-four team. Wonders will never cease.
Nottingham Forest
Has Steve Cooper found a new approach (and is it too late for it to work)? At Anfield on Saturday, Cooper left Brennan Johnson on the bench and moved Taiwo Awoniyi into a more central position. Until recently, the plan has been to play three attacking players: Johnson, Morgan Gibbs-White and one other. But that has led to Forest being overrun in midfield, meaning two things happen: 1) When they lose the ball, it doesn’t take much for their opponent to create a good chance; 2) Gibbs-White, Johnson and the forward can very easily get isolated.
The new strategy deliberately sacrifices possession (Forest had 14.2 per cent of the ball in the first half) and looks to restrict their opponents by defending deep and playing with the game in front of them. Too often, Forest have four or five players forced to chase towards their own goal.
It should have worked. Forest were comfortably beaten on xG, but Diogo Jota had the only clear chance of the first half and Cooper’s side twice got themselves back level through effective counter attacks. Gibbs-White in particular enjoyed more freedom. When Johnson came on, he too had a good chance and hit the bar.
Unfortunately, no tactic will work if you don’t defend simple situations properly. “The boys stuck to the plan, carried it out well and we had success in the game so to concede three set-pieces is hugely frustrating,” said Cooper after the game and he’s right. To leave a man free on one free-kick is careless, but to do it twice is unforgivable. These are the differences between staying up and going down.
Southampton
Clearly a 3-3 draw away at the Premier League leaders is a positive result, particularly given the other scores this weekend. Would Southampton have greedily accepted taking the same number of points as Leeds this weekend? Absolutely. Carlos Alcaraz looks to be one of Southampton’s best signings this season and he might have a say in the relegation battle yet. We’d written Southampton off, but the fight to draw with Arsenal suggests that they still believe.
But you have to make the most of the good moments when you’re bottom of the league and Southampton did twice lead by two clear goals, including with three minutes of normal time remaining. They hadn’t even held a one-goal lead in their previous six league matches – how many more chances will they have?
Ruben Selles must accept his own culpability in the late collapse. For 86 minutes, Romeo Lavia was the best player on the pitch. It wasn’t just that he made tackles and intercepted passes, although he did both. Lavia is unusual in a struggling team in that, when he wins back the ball, he doesn’t immediately panic and rush to pass on the ball before pressure arrives. For a 19-year-old, he is remarkably mature. Lavia completed every pass he attempted into the opposition half.
And then Selles took him off and replaced him with Ibrahima Diallo. Suddenly Arsenal had the run of the midfield and sensed – and seized – their chance. Selles has already called out Lavia for not dominating games in early March, but this call was far more immediately proven to be foolish. On such decisions, seasons are defined.
Tottenham
Fair play to Tottenham’s players on Sunday, who have spent the week offering their sympathies to Davinson Sanchez for being booed by supporters and demonstrated their support by all getting booed against Newcastle. And people say that this group is lacking community spirit and morale.
Pick your favourite image that epitomises the most embarrassing half of football in Tottenham’s Premier League history. Is it Hugo Lloris, the club captain who should never have been recalled ahead of Fraser Forster (and may now have played his last game for Spurs), being substituted at half-time? Or is it the look on the faces of Jacob Murphy and Alexander Isak after they scored, as if to say “it isn’t meant to be this easy – have we got it on the wrong setting?”
This was a dismantling of everything that Tottenham have failed to build or have built upon sand. They faced an up-and-coming club who are together, have a manager they want, have a style of play that the players and staff have bought into and have a strategy in the transfer market. And Tottenham couldn’t cope because they possess none of those things.
Tottenham supporters have been trying to tell us this would happen, when cynics pointed at the league table and questioned why there was a cloud of negativity around the club. This has been coming. There has been dismal football, embarrassing individual mistakes, odd team selections and ineffective tactical plans all season; each has slowly sapped the belief of those on the pitch. They came to a head on Sunday because they faced a team that punished their tactical nothingness and their morose demeanour.
But this has been coming in a macro sense too. This is the inevitable result of a club whose decision makers failed to appreciate how much they were over-achieving, refused to back Mauricio Pochettino after he took them to the Champions League final and then blamed him for the fallout.
It continued with the appointment of managers who either never seemed a good fit or who never really wanted to be there in the first place. And it has peaked with the appointment of a caretaker manager who was soaked in the effluence of Antonio Conte’s exit when there was a Champions League place on the line.
In some situations, afternoons like these can retain a faint positive lining: they lay bare the problems with such damning emphasis that nobody can ignore them any longer. But can you say the same about Tottenham? They seem less likely to learn from their mistakes as they do to double down on or ignore them. The fun part is that Daniel Levy now has to persuade a forward-thinking, capable manager to take on this project. Good luck, pal – you’ll need it.
West Ham
That will do very nicely indeed. West Ham are now up in the heady heights of 13th and six points clear of the bottom three with a game in hand. In their last three matches, David Moyes has ensured that he will get the fond farewell that his two spells in charge merit. They are staying up and they are favourites to win a European trophy.
Sunday was probably West Ham’s best performance of the season. It was also their joint-biggest Premier League win since 2007 and the first time that they have recorded 10 shots on target in a Premier League game for the first time since Cardiff City in December 2018. They’re also only five points behind Chelsea, and you bet that the supporters are eyeing that up.
Moyes is not going to stay on next season – that would be a mistake. But there is something very admirable about the manner of West Ham’s recent recovery coming through an acceptance from Moyes that he needed to become a little more expansive. It would have been very easy to go into his shell and rely upon the pragmatism that built his reputation. He’s done the opposite.
Sunday’s win against (admittedly a very meek) Bournemouth was the perfect example. Declan Rice was allowed to roam forward at will and Lucas Paqueta had a free role in which he could explore different pockets of the pitch in search of mischief. They sacrificed possession (33 per cent) but always looked to counter. I don’t know if 10 different West Ham players have had a shot in any other league game this season, but I’d be surprised. Just for fun, nine players created chances too.
That should shape West Ham’s search for a new manager this summer. Even if Declan Rice leaves (and Kalvin Phillips would be a decent replacement), this is a squad that has far more capability than has been demonstrated for much of this season. Improvement may lie in Moyes’ replacement embracing the attacking quality and reinforcing the defence.
Wolves
It has not been a good nine months for Pablo Sarabia. Last June, he was scoring and assisting for Spain in the Nations League against Portugal, Switzerland and Czech Republic. He began the domestic season with starts for Paris Saint-Germain in the Trophee des Champions and Ligue 1. And now he’s basically unfit for purpose for Wolves having joined them on a permanent deal in January. Still, at least he’s going to get a medal for winning the French league.
Sarabia might well be a good wide forward or advanced central midfielder in a team that dominates possession and territory, but he is certainly not suited to playing as a wide midfielder for a bottom-half Premier League team that routinely looks to play on the counter attack. He isn’t quick and he doesn’t appear to be capable of getting forward and then back again to help out defensively.
And even if Sarabia is suited to those bigger clubs, his output doesn’t justify their faith. For PSG and Wolves this season, Sarabia has scored one goal from 31 shots and failed to contribute a single assist. That he played for Spain in the knockout stages of the World Cup in December remains baffling. And he missed his penalty having been brought on for the shootout.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/YVXylqK
Post a Comment