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
The title race may not technically be over, but Arsenal’s players and manager admitted that their race was run after a 3-0 home defeat followed Manchester City’s own 3-0 win at Everton. Mikel Arteta’s side were outplayed by a rampant Brighton side.
Down at the bottom, unexpected points for Leeds and Nottingham Forest muddy the waters even further: Forest have the points but more difficult fixtures, Everton have the easier fixtures but keep failing to win at home and Leeds have Sam Allardyce and goodness knows what that actually means yet.
The European places are also still undecided, although Tottenham had their hearts broken further by defeat at Aston Villa and the news that Mauricio Pochettino is almost certain to join Chelsea. It never rains…
This weekend’s results
Saturday 13 May
- Aston Villa 2-1 Tottenham
- Chelsea 2-2 Nottingham Forest
- Crystal Palace 2-0 Bournemouth
- Leeds 2-2 Newcastle
- Manchester United 2-0 Wolves
- Southampton 0-2 Fulham
Sunday 14 May
- Brentford 2-0 West Ham
- Everton 0-3 Manchester City
- Arsenal 0-3 Brighton
Monday
- Leicester vs Liverpool
Arsenal
Well, it was fun while it lasted. I don’t mean that as a taunt nor a throwaway line. Had you offered any Arsenal supporter second place at the start of August, they would have wondered what on earth had happened to their club in the interim. Football has always done a good line in unhappy endings; that is why if you choose to focus only on the destination and not the journey, you make yourself a hostage to fortune. There have been moments in this campaign that, if you are of an Arsenal persuasion, you look to the future with great hope and excitement.
The final nail in this coffin, along with Manchester City’s irrepressible form, is Arsenal’s defending at home over the last two months. I don’t know whether it is because injuries caused issues (they clearly did), fatigue and pressure set in (maybe) or everyone simply got a little over-excited, but Arsenal needed a ruthless run of home victories if they were to keep pace with City. Mikel Arteta’s team have now conceded more home goals this season than Nottingham Forest, among many others. They have dropped points against Southampton, West Ham, Brentford, Brighton and Newcastle.
Against Brighton, Arsenal can clearly have no complaints. They met opponents that were motivated to make amends for a dreadful home defeat to Everton, are desperate to qualify for Europe and are committed to a style of play that forced Arsenal into uncomfortable decisions. The dark arts that Arsenal used so successfully against Newcastle (and were cheered so readily by their supporters) were used against them to dramatic effect. Arsenal failed to take their half chances; Brighton were not as generous.
And in this performance, you witness the overachievement of what came before. Ben White has been filling in as a right-back, but Kaoru Mitoma made him look silly. Granit Xhaka is a good Premier League midfielder but not a great one – he never had control against Moises Caicedo and Pascal Gross whenever they switched positions. Jakub Kiwior is not a starting central defender for a title-chasing club (or at least not yet) and he was given a hospital pass when replacing William Saliba. The whole dynamic of the attacking play changes when Oleksandr Zinchenko is missing.
There will be regret. There will be crowing from the supporters of rival clubs who have long given up salvaging anything from their own seasons and so want to feast upon the misery of their enemies. There will be accusations of bottling in some quarters, nearly all of which will be inaccurate. Sometimes, being very good is not enough. When vying with Manchester City for a Premier League title, being very good is never enough.
Premier League table
Aston Villa
The European dream is back on. Aston Villa have won six home Premier League games on the bounce for the first time since 1993 and have done it while conceding a single goal. Nothing makes sense anymore other than every decision that Unai Emery seemingly makes.
Are Villa in the best position in 30 years? That does a disservice to the league finishes under Martin O’Neill, but then the Premier League was an environment in which you could punch above your weight more easily and in which Villa were a genuinely big club. Now it takes savviness, money, ambition and logic. For too long (even this season), some or all of those seemed absent. Now Emery has transformed a club which will soon appoint Barcelona’s sporting director and is laying foundations for the future.
Emery has always believed that good form starts with making your home stadium a place that opposition teams dread coming to. During his short tenure to date, Villa have beaten Manchester United, Newcastle and Tottenham. There is no great secret: you work as hard as you have to to get the ball back and you prepare accordingly so that when you get it there is a strategy to create chances.
There is nothing without the hard work, and on Saturday there was nothing without John McGinn. Three Aston Villa players gained possession six times each against Tottenham – Ashley Young, Alex Moreno and Douglas Luiz. Above them was McGinn, who gained possession 12 times. When he’s in this form (and facing an opposition midfield that looks under-staffed and under-motivated), he is a catalyst for everything around him.
Bournemouth
Bournemouth are staying up, and they might do it as record-breakers. In the Premier League era, the outright leakiest defence in the division has never survived relegation (Crystal Palace were the last in 1989-90). As it stands, Bournemouth have conceded at least twice more than any other team. If Gary O’Neil is already looking ahead to next season – and how much would any fan have paid for that luxury in January? – he knows that it is his defensive line that must improve most.
“Next season will come and we can’t concede as many goals next season from set plays as we have this season, defending the penalty area, crosses and things,” O’Neil said this week when previewing the Palace game.
It’s fair to say that there is still work to do as Bournemouth fell foul of every point O’Neil made. They allowed chances from crosses in open play (Wilfried Zaha air-kicked from three yards out) and they allowed chances from set pieces. Bournemouth have a specific issue in dropping deep on corners and either are slow to react to a short, pre-planned move or fail to pick up men on the edge of the box (Will Hughes had one excellent shot saved from that same situation).
And in open play, Bournemouth’s defenders can get too easily dragged out of position. See Palace’s opening goal for details: Zaha attracts three players on the wide edge of the box, none of whom stop him. That leaves way too much room for Eberechi Eze 10 yards from goal.
And THREE points go to…Crystal Palace
— Crystal Palace F.C. (@CPFC) May 13, 2023#CPFC | #Eurovision2023 pic.twitter.com/fGdoYdbmW9
Brentford
No better time to play West Ham, but a significant day for Thomas Frank and Brentford as they secured a top-half finish in the top flight for the first time since 1938. All that talk of second-season syndrome feels an awfully long time ago.
I wanted to pick out Bryan Mbeumo for some praise, because I’d be surprised if there is another Premier League player with 13 goals and assists or more who gets talked about less. Mbeumo is still only 23 and is exactly the type of player that Frank loves deeply.
“Bryan is sometimes going a little bit under the radar – I think he’s a fantastic player,” Brentford’s manager said after the game. “I think he could and should have scored more and was probably a little bit unlucky in some situations. Plus the importance for us in pressing and defensive work, he works so hard for the team.”
The absence of Ivan Toney seemed to release Mbeumo, allowing him to get closer to the penalty area rather than providing crosses. He had 11 touches in the opposition box, more than in any other game since promotion. He also had six shots which is more than in any game since promotion other than the 2-0 win over West Ham last season. “Can he play you every week?” etc and so on.
A final thing to mention is that Brentford have lost one home league game since the 3-0 against a rampant Arsenal in September. They beat Brighton and Liverpool. They played five other London clubs, all of whom might have fancied their chances of finishing above Brentford and didn’t lose to any of them. There’s a lot of talk of raucous bumper home crowds and fortresses, but you can just be better by… well, being better.
Brighton
The greatest performance of their greatest season. It must be a transcendental feeling watching this team as a long-suffering Brighton supporter, knowing that you came from almost nothing and have turned into this extraordinary football team and forward-thinking club that is the envy of many across the world. Every one of them lives every day knowing that this is as good as it will ever get and yet tomorrow always feels just a little bit brighter.
There is simply no more fascinating team to watch in the country. The commitment to playing a certain style of football, passing out from the back even when the press gets heavy and the passing options seem virtually non-existent, is astonishing. It is absorbing not because it always works, but because it usually does and the results either way are spectacular.
What I love most about Roberto De Zerbi’s Brighton is not the highwire nature of the football, but how it quickly shifts mid-move into comfortable control. There have been teams before who have taken risks with their passing, but precious few of them have such a set knowledge of how they are knitting together attacks when the ball gets over the halfway line as them. And that exists whoever is selected and whichever position they play in. Mitoma and Julio Enciso (he’s 19, for goodness’ sake) swapped wings. Caicedo played at right-back. Pervis Estupinan was basically a whole left side and Danny Welbeck floated around like a 90s Serie A No 10 when he came on.
Finally, Brighton are quickly learning the dark arts under De Zerbi. The one criticism of them under Graham Potter (other than the profligacy in front of goal) is that Brighton were a little too “sunshine”. Now they stay down injured, break up play with tactical fouls and push the needle in terms of delaying play. You can hate it if you want (although you aren’t allowed if you love it when your team does it), but it is increasingly one of the markers of elite football teams.
After the game, Mikel Arteta said that he was deeply disappointed that Arsenal “gave the game away” in the second half. It’s normal for a manager to focus on his own side more than the opposition, but that is one of Brighton’s greatest tricks: they make you feel like you have no choice but to do the things you know you shouldn’t. If Arsenal made mistakes, Brighton forced them. I’m in love, and if you aren’t then you’re a Crystal Palace fan always or an Arsenal fan this weekend.
Chelsea
A weekend that will be dominated by the apparent confirmation that Mauricio Pochettino has agreed a deal to become the club’s new manager at the end of the season was headlined by another lethargic, limp step in the wrong direction and a hint at some of the problems that Pochettino will face.
The defensive organisation remains a massive problem, albeit aided by Frank Lampard’s late-season rotation. The set-piece defending against Forest was desperate. They must find a way next season to get Enzo Fernandez higher up the pitch or they risk turning an exciting, adventurous, £108m central midfielder into a functional passer. If you merged together all of their right-sided forwards there is a fine starting option, but not in isolation.
And yet it’s the brief glimpses of positivity that, ironically, cause the most headaches. Raheem Sterling scored twice against Forest and scared Serge Aurier when he ran directly at him. In that left-sided role, Sterling remains a brilliant forward and Pochettino may well look to build the attack around him.
But then what about Mykhailo Mudryk, who has started three league games since 11 March – 2-0 home defeat to Aston Villa, 2-1 home defeat to Brighton and the 3-1 win at Bournemouth when he was substituted with the score at 1-1? It’s fully understandable that Mudryk may need this half-season to acclimatise in English football, but Pochettino is going to have to hit the ground running and he wasn’t the one who signed Muryk for £80m. So do you go with the senior player, or the vastly expensive signing on the long contract?
That’s why this job is so hard. The investment demands results and an instant return to the top four, but at Tottenham Pochettino had a small-ish squad packed with players the manager developed. Here, it’s the sheer range of options that makes life difficult.
Crystal Palace
This has been Eberechi Eze’s breakout season. When he is driving at defenders, the ball under nonsensically comfortable control despite him moving at speed, there are few players in the country better to watch than Eze. His second goal against Bournemouth reminded of Eden Hazard in his pomp, defenders forced to turn both ways to guess what Eze would do next and the finish emphatic.
But I’m more interested in Eze’s first goal, because that demonstrates how he has got to double figures for Premier League goals this season, despite only starting 28 games: he is incredibly effective and finding space in the box. In the 11 games before Roy Hodgson arrived, when Eze was often left out of the team as Patrick Vieira struggled to stop the bleeding, he touched the ball 12 times in the opposition penalty area. In eight games under Roy Hodgson, Eze has had 27 penalty-box touches.
The most impressive element of this is that Eze is not always playing as an attacker. On Saturday, he nominally started as a right-sided central midfielder (in a three) who was told to swap positions with Michael Olise further forward but also drift centrally. It is those runs, from out to in and arriving in the box as an attack builds, that has done more than anything else to keep Palace up with ease.
Everton
How many times have we said this now: and then Manchester City happened. By which we mean: when they sense a weakness, particularly against a low block, they open a little hatch below the dashboard and show you three new gears. Within 120 seconds, Gundogan is crossing for Haaland and the Premier League’s Mr Inevitable has a grin on his face like he’s just teased John Stones. And there’s still time for the Gundogan party piece, a free kick curled over the wall to make Jordan Pickford look like a schoolkid playing in the big goals on the top field for the first time.
There was reason for cheer for Sean Dyche here, even if one of City’s other tricks is to make you dig deep in the ground for the positive vibes. At Wolves and at home to Bournemouth, they have two fixtures in which this midfield energy and attacking wing play can return at least the four points that might well be enough to stay up. Calvert-Lewin has taken some stick this season for the heinous crime of being injured, but if Dyche can get players close to him he is one of the finest strikers in the country with back to goal.
But cheer soon dissipates in the moment against Manchester City; 30 minutes after you believed in an unlikely victory you are bringing on central defenders to try and protect your goal difference. Everything about this team in this setting is inevitable: suffocating pressure, unyielding control, marvellous combinations between marvellous players.
And when that doesn’t get you, a comparatively unheralded central midfielder will end up showing you why he is one of the best at what he does in the whole damn sport. Twenty-two players kick a ball around and, almost always, Manchester City win. Twenty clubs do it across an entire season and they usually win that too. Resistance is futile. Move onto the next one and console yourselves that it’ll be a while before you meet them again.
Fulham
This weekend, Fulham won their 15th Premier League game of the season. That is significant because it sets a new record for victories in a Premier League season for this club, despite this being their 16th campaign and despite Fulham still having three games left.
We live in an age where we really didn’t think this was possible, for a yo-yo club to immediately haul themselves up into Premier League consolidation without spending a king’s ransom to overhaul the team. Leeds did it but spent around £120m in one summer and bobbed between the top and bottom half before a strong finish. Sheffield United did it but didn’t win 15 games.
Fulham spent £50m on new players last summer, which clearly isn’t insignificant, but they have seen their best striker and top goalscorer banned for more than a quarter of their season to date. They haven’t even been out of the top half since August. What I’m saying is this: if Manchester City win the league over Arsenal, Marco Silva is my Manager of the Year.
Leeds
I wrote this last weekend, which seems a fitting place to start: “They know that their collision with Allardyce, Karl Robinson and Robbie Keane is a bizarre short-term stand of convenience, but also that it is their shot to nothing and everything all at once. There is still life here. Now onto Newcastle and West Ham, with something that feels a lot like hope in their hearts.”
And that is exactly how it felt watching the atmosphere and performance against Newcastle. Allardyce is not going to be able to make Leeds fireproof, not with this short time in charge and the club’s predisposition towards chaos. They faced 18 shots, had a man sent off and there were times when it seemed that the madness of the club was leaking out of the pores of every player on the pitch.
But Allardyce has forced a change, partly because he isn’t Javi Gracia and partly because he has embraced those chaotic elements as a shot to nothing. Leeds played a kid and a centre-back in midfield, a full-back in central defence and their second-choice goalkeeper who is now apparently a temporary No 1. That level of change has caused understandable uncertainty, but also fight and belief and a wave of new energy.
Of course Leeds will still get you in the end. Given Patrick Bamford’s form and penalty record, Rodrigo being on the pitch means that he should have taken the spot-kick and, maybe, have given Leeds a precious unassailable lead. They only hope that Bamford’s miss won’t be the moment that haunts them in June, July and beyond.
But Leeds have a sporting chance because they have the best fixtures of any team down there. West Ham might well still be in Europe and thus pick a scratch team. Tottenham come to Elland Road on the final day and everyone who has ever stepped foot in the stadium looks like they want this season to end. Four points is perfectly achievable and that would leave other teams, with more difficult fixtures, needing points too. This is on.
Leicester
Play Liverpool on Monday.
Liverpool
Play Leicester on Monday.
Man City
We all dream of a team of Gundogans. If Txiki Begiristain did not march into the away dressing room at Goodison after full-time armed with a new contract that has an extra 12 months added to the length and an extra zero at the end of the number that matters, he is no sporting director extraordinaire.
Where would Manchester City be without Ilkay Gundogan? Maybe still at the top of the league. This is a footballing steamroller and there is quality to spare in every position. But when league seasons get tight and tense and Pep Guardiola needs a man to keep his head while others are fretting, he can normally turn to silky Ilkay and get the answer he desires.
For 30 minutes, Manchester City were being intensely frustrated. The game settled into a pattern in seconds and stayed there: City possession – loads; City incisiveness – not a lot. They passed and they passed some more, but eventually the ball was attracted like a magnet into the penalty area and a Dychian disciple headed it clear. Yerry Mina tried to get into Erling Haaland’s head and City players were hounded and harassed and forced to turn back. They have no problem with taking that option, but it can lead to stagnancy.
Nor was this a one-dimensional plan from Everton. Sit back and sit back only against Manchester City and they will eventually kill you with one of their thousand passes. Everton’s band of brothers in midfield – Garner, McNeil, Gueye, Onana, Doucoure – sprinted to sniff out even a chance of winning the ball, but they rarely played the one-per cent passes that just invites more pressure. Alex Iwobi dashed down one wing. Dominic Calvert-Lewin held the ball up like a man who has not seen enough of it over the last three months.
But, as with every great magician, it’s the moment that you think you have sussed the trick that the ball appears in the other cup. Manchester City do not need more than half-chances to make you look silly. The cross was hopeful but Gundogan’s touch and flick, on the turn and somehow delivered in one moment, stopped you in your tracks. Us mere mortals would have accidentally handballed or pulled a muscle just trying it and there are other professional footballers nodding in agreement.
The common wisdom is that Gundogan will one day turn his attention to coaching and you can see why he will probably be damn good at that too. It’s not just the effortless vision, the appreciation of space and weight and timing of passes, the self-admonishment went something, anything goes awry. It is the manner in which he appears to operate at a slightly slower speed physically than everyone around him, as if internally becalmed by his own excellence. Why rush, guys; Ilkay has got this.
Man Utd
It doesn’t matter who Erik ten Hag picks: Anthony Martial as the selfless striker or Marcus Rashford, when he is fit; Wout Weghorst as the rogue pressing No 10; Antony and Jadon Sancho on the wings or one of the academy graduates. Whoever is there and whatever happens, Bruno Fernandes is the chance-creating mastercraftsman.
Bruno’s antics make him hard for a neutral to warm to – the moaning, the whining, the play-acting and the tendency to lambast his teammates for not doing something he also hasn’t done. But as soon as the ball arrives at his feet, if you can forget all of that then you can instantly sit forward in your seat and wait to see what happens next. On the ball at least, there is no better example-setter in this team.
In terms of shot-creating actions from open play, as good as any measure of a player’s creativity, Bruno is on 147. That isn’t just a distance away from any other Manchester United player; it’s in a different county. Jadon Sancho comes next, on 68.
And the same is true of the Premier League as a whole. While no other United player makes the individual top 20 (why would they, when Bruno wants to do it all and is capable of it), there’s nobody in the league that comes close either. Kevin De Bruyne comes next on the list, and he’s 29 behind Bruno.
Newcastle
How vital could Callum Wilson’s two penalties be in the context of the top-four race? I know some folk judge a penalty as a lesser goal (and I get it, you get a free shot for someone else’s fine work, but then why is that much different to a tap in?), but Wilson has scored all nine of his penalties since joining Newcastle and it’s now 15 of his last 16 at club level.
More importantly for Newcastle, Wilson has now scored nine goals in his last nine Premier League matches. This is a team effort, but it is Wilson’s goals that are taking Newcastle tantalisingly close to the Champions League. Given the injury niggles and Eddie Howe’s occasional preference for Alexander Isak instead of Wilson rather than with him, it’s worth pointing out that Wilson is now averaging a goal for every 100 Premier League minutes this season, second only to Erling Haaland. You don’t mind being runner-up to him.
On a more personal note, Wilson is now onto 17 league goals for the season. Before 2022-23, the only times that he had ever scored 15 goals in a league season were for Coventry City (in League One) and Bournemouth (in the Championship). That’s a career hat-trick that keeps you warm in your dotage.
Nottingham Forest
This is going to go down to the wire, probably leaving Forest needing one or three points on the final day to stay up. But after Leeds picked up an unexpected point against Newcastle on Saturday lunchtime, it was absolutely vital that Forest did the same at 3pm.
For a while, it looked like the same old west London story. Against Brentford a fortnight ago, Forest went 1-0 before half-time before conceding two goals in relatively quick succession (the story of their season) and lost the game. This time, Sterling threatened to do the same but Forest pulled themselves back. That is a handy new habit: they have taken only nine points after falling behind this season but four of those points have come in their last four matches.
We also have to recognise the role that Taiwo Awoniyi is playing in Forest’s survival fight. It has not been an easy first season back in England for Awoniyi, suffering one lengthy layout and asked to play wide left in the autumn to run the channels and hold up the ball. But since his return, Steve Cooper has shifted things to get Awoniyi more central and it’s working. He has four goals in his last two games that have earned Forest four crucial points.
Awoniyi had three or more touches of the ball in the penalty area in four of his first 14 Premier League appearances. He’s now done the same in five of his last six matches. Cooper will hope that he now has the form striker in the bottom six at just the right time.
Southampton
This is how it ends, not in a blaze of defiance with backs-against-the-wall, let’s-do-it-for-the-fans wins, but with a half-empty ground booing the end of an era with home defeat to a promoted club (Fulham) who have spent less and achieved infinitely more.
Southampton were all but mathematically relegated anyway, but there are means of dealing with that situation. Not like this: 0.24 xG, one shot on target, sacrificing possession but barely using the counter attack effectively. They haven’t won a league game since March, have won three home league games since February 2022 and kept one clean sheet at St Mary’s all season. They deserve all of this.
The bad decisions stacked up like final notice bills. The decision to appoint Nathan Jones, an astonishing gamble, looms large over Southampton’s season, but so too should appointing Ruben Selles as caretaker until the end of the season based on one result, exclusively buying inexperienced young players but not surrounding them with high-level experience and sticking with Ralph Hasenhuttl for as long as they did despite him looking increasingly weary in his job.
January was a shot to nothing that Southampton still managed to mess up. They at least seemed to be buying to a plan: two strikers, one of them a giant, two wingers or creative wide players. Play Paul Onuachu with Carlos Alcaraz, start Kamaldeen Sulemana and Milan Orsic and try to overhaul the playing style. Put crosses into the box and make the most of James Ward-Prowse’s set-piece delivery. But Onuachu started four games, Sulemana nine and Orsic has played six minutes since arriving.
And you are left with a mess: Stuart Armtrong and Theo Walcott starting on the wings, Alcaraz often on his own until it was too late, goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu dropped for Alex McCarthy and Romeo Lavia left helpless in midfield because he is a kid and he can’t do it all by himself. Senior players who have one eye on the exit door, young players who don’t know how to react to the rapid decline and a manager who won’t be there next season and probably won’t be there in a month’s time. When Ward-Prowse said that the club’s standards had slipped, this is what he meant.
The young players do have sell-on value. Southampton could well come back quickly and may even come back stronger; relegation does at least allow for a full spring clean. But leaving the Premier League, given the broadcasting revenues on offer, is never a good thing. The first full season of a new ownership regime ends with Southampton rock bottom of the league. They may be preaching that this is the time to stick together, but trust takes a lot longer to win back than it does to be lost.
Tottenham
Even by Tottenham’s new standards, this has been a heck of a weekend. It began with the news that Julian Nagelsmann was no longer under consideration for the manager’s job, with the club making it known that they were never seriously interested in the former Bayern Munich head coach. Whether that’s true or whether this was a “never fancied her anyway” scenario doesn’t really matter. The standout candidate for the job is not coming.
Then, on Saturday evening, we learned that Mauricio Pochettino’s appointment as Chelsea manager is shortly to be confirmed, so the romantic choice is no longer either. Worse than that, the past is now tainted too. Any Spurs supporter who has been dwelling on better times to allay the misery of the present now has those memories scorched by the news that Pochettino isn’t just failing to come home, he’s getting remarried to the school bully.
In the middle of that foul sandwich, another Premier League defeat. European football next season is still on, but not even Tottenham keep playing with such reckless abandon in defence. There was some pushback online over criticism of Cristian Romero after Saturday which followed the lines of “Errr, he’s our best centre-back”. Yes, which is exactly the point. He’s also the most expensive, so it would be nice if he didn’t charge around like a man with hot coals in his boots.
There is something incredibly morose about watching Harry Kane of late, creating chances and scoring goals in games that ultimately won’t matter because everything behind, around and above him are broken at the club he loves.
West Ham
It’s clearly completely understandable for David Moyes to heavily rotate his team around West Ham’s European assignments. They travel to Alkmaar this midweek knowing that a draw would give them a shot at both a trophy, European silverware and a place in the competition that they loved so much two seasons ago. West Ham are basically safe (not mathematically but it isn’t going to happen), so why not make nine changes?
But Moyes must have been deeply disappointed by the subsequent performance. They were emphatically second best, allowing Brentford to take 24 shots and managing just four of their own and fortunate to only lose the game 2-0. This felt like one of the last matches of a manager’s tenure and it surely is. Lukasz Fabianski was comfortably West Ham’s best player.
And this was still a decent starting XI. Nayef Aguerd played an inglorious role in both of Brentford’s goals. Emerson cost £15m last summer and struggled at left-back. Tomas Soucek is too often literally “just a body” in West Ham’s midfield and made life more difficult for Flynn Downes. Pablo Fornals is desperately out of form. Maxwel Cornet now only looks useful as a roll of the dice off the bench. Danny Ings has not scored since his full league debut. Those players mentioned include a collection of signings that cost West Ham more than £80m.
The result is by the by, although it does reinforce just how below par this league season has been in general. The performances by many of those tasked with pushing for minutes in a European semi-final and final, were worrying. Let’s hope nobody remembers it come Friday morning.
Wolves
Daniel Bentley is 29 years old. Until January he was a Championship staple, first for Brentford and then Bristol City. There were some eyebrows raised when Bentley signed for Wolves in the winter transfer window on a two-and-half-year deal. Did he not want to play regular football?
Sure, but you’re also only an injury or rotation away from making your Premier League debut. With safety secured, Julen Lopetegui gave Bentley his chance. He could do nothing about Manchester United’s two goals – both came from Wolves being too open in central midfield and flat-footed defensively – but Bentley made three excellent saves with a strong hand to stop Antony, Bruno and Sancho.
Bentley might not be first choice anymore, but he will always be a Premier League appearance maker and he will never forget making his debut at Old Trafford.
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