It's not a conspiracy if you're picking up all three points at home
Arsenal and Manchester City lead the charge in a brief Premier League round-up.
Well, won’t you just look at that? We’re breaking up for another international break and who is that there, sitting atop the Premier League table but… is that Tottenham Hotspur? Perhaps the end times really are upon us, after all. Spurs’ lofty position was confirmed by Arsenal, of all people, whose 1-0 win against Manchester City on Sunday afternoon kept Spurs top by two goals on goals scored, with the teams inseperable after eight games, and with an identical goal difference.
Spurs had started the weekend with an inelegant but ultimately effective 1-0 win at Luton Town in the Saturday lunchtime match. Wearing a kit that feels as though it might have been designed as either an optical illusion or a thought experiment, they lost Yves Bissouma to an ill-thought out second yellow card, and Luton did have chances to get back into the game, but the team held on to pick up the sort of scrappy win that has been conspicuous by its absence from Spurs teams in recent years. This was the sort of game that they might easily have lost, certainly last season.
And Arsenal finished the weekend off with a 1-0 win over Manchester City marked by more peculiar VAR-ctivity and a late goal from Gabriel Martinelli which will doutbless, should Arsenal actually win the Premier League come the end of this season, come to be seen as a significant springboard towards their success. Their only disappointment may be that the chance to quickly build greater momentum is muted by that break.
VAR-trage of the week belonged to two fouls in a couple of minutes ten minutes from half-time by Mateo Kovacic, the first of which brought a yellow card that leaned toward being a red itself, the second of which might easily have warranted a second yellow but which resulted in nothing at all. There likely wasn’t much of a thought process behind this. The second in particular looked like a a rush of blood to the head manifesting itself as pitch rage.
The failure to send Kovacic off will have set off some group of conspiracy theorists or other, and it’s not difficult to start to get confused by who backs who in this sort of argument. But while I don’t believe that there’s a conspiracy against Arsenal, of all people, I do think that the wall of silence that follows this sort of thing happening is a vaccuum into which anything can be sucked, and that this silence—occasionally punctuated by an apology from the PGMOL written in the manner of a police officer apologising for having run over your cat—is very bad for the Premier League.
Perhaps they need some sort of liaison between the weird world of referees and the rest of us, someone who can parse their messages and decrypt them into a language which doesn’t sound like leaked recordings from a paintball expedition that is being taken 10% too seriously. Not a referee. No, certainly not Mike Dean. A normal person, who understands the perspective of the fans, of the media, and of the clubs, players and referees, who can inject a little bit of calm into this increasingly frenetic and angry game. NO, NOT MATTHEW LE TISSIER.
Manchester City, meanwhile, continue to stutter, having now lost successive league matches to Wolves and Arsenal, as well as their Carabao Cup match against Newcastle United. This does not constitute a crisis. They are, after all, two points off the top of the table with eight games of the season played. But things might have been worse had Kovacic walked, and it remains the case that they are already effectively playing with ten if they’re not getting the ball into positions for Erling Haaland to feed off. Pep Guardiola will probably welcome the break more than Mikel Arteta.
Elsewhere, it had been Cancelling Each Other Out Sunday prior to this match. Liverpool missed out on the opportunity to go third and Brighton missed the opportunity to go fourth with a knockout 2-2 draw most notable for the sheer number of catastrophic defensive mistakes. Why don’t these players ever come out and explain themselves afterwards, eh? The rest of the 2.00 kick-offs had all followed the same pattern, with Newcastle coming from behind to lead West Ham until they didn’t any more, and Wolves and Aston Villa managing a goal each in the space of three second half minutes. Villa stay fifth.
Back on Saturday afternoon, it’s a bit early to say that either Chelsea or Manchester United are BACK BACK BACK at the moment, but neither is there anything wrong with their supporters being happy at their teams winning. The entire inner monologue of football these days seems fine-tuned to try and make it as miserable an experience as possible.
It seems unlikely that Scotredo di Tomano’s unlikely Stars In Their Eyes turn as 1993-era Steve Bruce and Ryan Giggs combined to force Manchester United past Brentford will kick-start an incredible transformation in their fortunes. For the previous 94 minutes of this match they’d been as abject as at any other point over the last few weeks. This moment doesn’t alter those structural shortcomings, and this was their fourth unconvincing Premier League win of the season. But it was an improvement on chasing shadows against Crystal Palace, and that’s… something?
If Chelsea are on a similar arc, they seem to be a little further down the line towards some form of actual recovery than Manchester United. At least at Chelsea there’s a team starting to form, though they’ll have tougher opponents to play in the coming weeks than this tepid Burnley nonsense. Vincent Kompany is falling short with Burnley at the moment. His team is leaking goals far too easily and don’t seem able to completely impose themselves upon a game. Chelsea continue to come together in fits and starts, Raheem Sterling on this occasion superb. But Sterling’s biggest issue this last couple of years has been his inconsistency. If he could do anything like this week-in-week-out, that fee that Chelsea paid Manchester City paid for him could quickly start to look like a steal.
Whisper it quietly, but Everton are starting to look like a football team. Admittedly, this edition faced the Premier League’s spongiest opposition in the form of Bournemouth on Saturday afternoon, and not only Sean Dyche his second straight league win, but on this occasion they did so with considerable style, as though the rocket delivered up the backside after their recent home defeat by Luton Town might actually have scared them into doing something. Bournemouth remain in the relegation places, without a win from their first eight matches, and not showing any signs of improvement, either. On Saturday evening, Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest reportedly played out a goalless draw.
But the final thought on this Monday morning has to go with Chris Basham of Sheffield United, who suffered a horrendous injury during Fulham’s 3-1 win against his team at Craven Cottage on Saturday afternoon. To say that it overshadowed the afternoon would be something of an understatement, and about as anybody can add is to wish him all the well with what looks like it may be a lengthy recovery period.