The Premier League Review: thousand yard stares and forty yard goals
A gap is opening up below fifth place in the Premier League table. Is this season's top five already starting to form?
At this stage, ten and a half years from their last Premier League title, there is something very familiar about the smell of dry rot that periodically starts to emanate from Old Trafford. On the sidelines stands the manager, the guy brought in after a process which took months because this is An Important Football Club, floodlights reflecting off his shiny bonce, speckled with the rain from yet another Manchester downpour, blankly looking into the abyss with the thousand yard stare of a man who isn’t quite condemned but whose spell in the dock is not going as he’d anticipated, his best laid plans dissolving into another amorphous puddle before his very eyes. Whatever it was supposed to look like, it wasn’t supposed to look like this.
You can imagine those first few days at Old Trafford, the arrival and that first walk-through; the main entrance, the grandeur and the history, meeting the staff and signing a few autographs for those buying into the narrative that all it needs is the right Messiah and all will be right again. Perhaps a bottle of red and a DVD of the 1968 European Cup final one evening to bring out the football romantic and serve as a reminder that there can be greatness here again, if he can just dig deep enough to extract it. Just think what he could achieve with the right preparation, the right coaching staff, and the players for whom he already knows this club has the budget.
But it always seems to end this way, with players who are visibly giving up before his very eyes and, upon the final whistle, that familiar sound of the 25,000-odd people who haven’t already left to get an earlier tram’s half-hearted boos echoing around this vast but crumbling arena. This is exactly what happened to Ralf, Ole, Jose, Louis and David before him. When Erik watched that DVD of the 1968 European Cup final, he presumably didn’t watch the documentary afterwards which told of the six years that followed it as well. Did that clip of Denis Law’s 1974 backheel at Old Trafford not serve as a loud enough warning of what can happen when things go wrong? Iconic images aren’t always positive, you know.
Everybody’s seen this film before. We all know the ending to a point at which it’s becoming formulaic. Typical United, a football club who at this point seem to be better at wasting everybody’s time than anything else. Announcing that the club is for sale? Sure, why not? Simply price it beyond what anybody with remotely as much money as sense would consider to be reasonable, leave it a year for divisions to fester among the fanbase, and then announce that actually you’re only selling a quarter of it and that there may be some extra money at some point. Or there may not.
This level of institutional sloth seems utterly endemic throughout the club. Thinkof redeveloping Old Trafford? Make a big showy announcement and then effectively do next to nothing. Hiring a new manager? Probably best that you undergo a search at a glacial speed, but with an interim head coach in place for most of what becomes another wasted season whose utter, abject frustration at this club’s inertia and dysfunction is written all over his face by his final couple of months.
Can Erik hold onto his job? Probably, but confidence that he’s the answer is now rapidly diminishing. And the most chastening thing about all of this is that Manchester City didn’t even have to be that good to get so comfortably over the line. They’ve not quite been firing on all cylinders this season, and United had chances that they couldn’t take. Yet with 50 minutes played Erling Haaland had scored twice, City led 2-0, and the jig was already up.
In the first half, Gary Neville had commented that the first six minutes had been the best he’d seen United play all season, an aside which spoke considerable volumes about what he’d seen the rest of the time. Andre Onana was probably their best player, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was an improvement to see him putting in a decent performance after a shaky few weeks, but on the other, it’s never an encouraging sign when your best player is the goalkeeper.
Sure, there’s an element of bad luck involved. For all that Ten Hag said an hour before kick-off, you don’t field a back line like that because you want to. There were injuries. The penalty which gave City the lead was arguably soft. But at the same time, we’ve all been here more than once before. Once again the Manchester derby ended as a reminder of the vast gulf which exists between these two clubs once the referee’s whistle blows and their respective teams start playing actual football. Manchester United 0-3 Manchester City. Plus ça change.
It wasn’t the only time over the course of the weekend that this familiar feeling of deja vu started to materialise. The previous lunchtime, Chelsea had kicked off against Brentford with a tiny swell of optimism in the air around Stamford Bridge. They may have thrown away a two-goal lead against Arsenal a week earlier, but they had at least done so with a flourish which suggested that their expensively-assembled Lego set of a team might finally be starting to resemble something coherent rather than an assortment of blue plastic bricks, scattered across a floor. Prior to that they’d been unbeaten for four matches, including a decent win at Fulham and knocking Brighton out of the League Cup.
They started well against Brentford, the first half occasionally resembling a game of attack vs defence. But then it all started to slide. The chances and half-chances weren’t converted, yet again. A goal was conceded, yet again. Mauricio Pochettino, evidently spooked by the Brentford goal, threw on attacking players to try and get back into the game, only to find the shape that his team had formed beforehand was starting to fall apart, yet again. In the last seconds, Brentford added a second into an empty net with goalkeeper Robert Sanchez scampering back in a manner which invited the addition of the Benny Hill music. Chelsea 0-2 Brentford. Plus ça change, aussi.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If I may make a recommendation to all reading this, might I suggest the restorative and calming effects of playing a kinda-tricky looking match on a Friday night and winning it to extend your lead at the top of the table to five points? It allows you to really pass the rest of the weekend, from a football perspective at least, in a state of relatively zen-like calm. Arsenal putting five past Sheffield United the following afternoon? No bother. The Blades are starting to look competitive for the crown of Worst Ever Premier League team. The gap is back to two points, but that couldn’t have been more expected. See? Zen-like.
The good news for Spurs won’t last. Never has a build ‘em up and knock ‘em down narrative felt more telegraphed than it does over the current Ange Postecoglou media love-in. But if this Spurs team is the best since [insert your year of preference here], supporters remain delighted enough to continue to just enjoy the ride. After all, what is the point, if you can’t make the most of it while the sun is shining? Heung Min Son and an own goal engineered from a low James Maddison cross were enough to get them over the line at Selhurst Park. It was almost enough to make you start absent-mindedly humming, “I’m on top of the world, looking down on creation”. (Okay, it was enough.)
This was a mildly dislocated weekend, with a feeling that half of our minds were elsewhere, what with the deaths of Bill Kenwright and Sir Bobby Charlton, the ongoing Middle East horror show and the kidnapping of Luis Diaz’s parents in Columbia. If Manchester United were too far gone to put on a playing tribute to their fallen legend in any meaningful sense through their performance in the derby—it’s reasonable to say that if the current Manchester United team were paying tribute to Charlton, they were focusing on the wrong period of his career—the same couldn’t be said for Liverpool or Everton.
Liverpool brushed aside Nottingham Forest with a degree of comfort, with the city of Nottingham still in a degree of shock over the horrific freak accident that occurred there on Saturday night. And Everton saw Bill Kenwright off with a confident, if workmanlike, 1-0 win at West Ham which put them three points off the giddying heights of the top half of the table. Dominic Calvert-Lewin scored the only goal of the game. What Bill would have wanted? Absolutely no question about that whatsoever. DCL has had a wretched couple of seasons with injury. If he’s fully recovered and there isn’t another recurrence hiding round the corner to bite the club on the backside, even the worst case scenario of the twelve-point deduction which has been rumoured for them over financial shenanigans might not even be a death sentence for their 70-year stay in the top flight. And if nothing else, Everton’s 1986-inspired away kit deserved that win.
Meanwhile over their shoulders, the bottom three places continue to recede into the distance. Bournemouth beat Burnley 2-1 courtesy of a Phil Billing forty-yarder with a quarter of an hour left to play, while there were few signs that Luton Town are going to suddenly spring to life from their 3-1 loss at Aston Villa. Villa’s win opened up a five point gap between fifth and sixth place because neither Brighton nor Newcastle could hold onto a lead. Brighton looked comfortable at half-time against Fulham with a 1-0 lead, only to lose their way in the pouring rain and be pegged back in the second half. Newcastle led twice at Wolves and were failed to hold onto it both times. If there’s one thing you can say for the Premier League so far this season, it’s that the current top five—Spurs, Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool and Aston Villa—have been noticeably better than the rest. There are certainly few signs from either Old Trafford or Stamford Bridge that there will be any particular challenge from two clubs who play there, both of whom have spent heavily over the years and would expect to be there. Plus ça change encore, on the basis of the last couple of seasons.