The Weekend: 21st August 2023
The biggest worry for Manchester United is that they lost so badly to a Spurs team who've had *this* 2023, so far.
This weekend’s review is on the men’s football, but if you did happen to be looking for my thoughts on the Women’s World Cup final and in particular England’s contribution, you can find that here.
For all the talk over the summer of change, of all those shiny new players coming through the doors of various clubs, what’s been most striking about the start to the Premier League season has been so similar to the end of the last. Manchester United are back to misfiring. Chelsea played as though they may as well have thrown £600m on a bonfire. Liverpool were patchy but had enough in the tank to get past Bournemouth. Everton.
There were points during the match between Spurs and Manchester United on Saturday evening when it became difficult not to think of the end of last season’s Premier League table, in which United had finished in third place in the Premier League. They’d ‘strengthened’ over the summer, hadn’t they? They hadn’t lost any truly ‘key’ players, had they? What does it say about the Premier League, if this is its third best team?
Much of the Premier League’s transfer noise can turn white at times, these days, but the common assent seemed to have been that Manchester United are having “A Good Window”. If the two matches that they’ve played so far have been any indicator, it’s difficult to imagine what they might have been like had they had a bad one. Or perhaps, just perhaps, looking at lists of ‘ins & outs’ might not be the best way to gauge how a team might perform over the ten months to come.
Actually, this is a little unfair on United, who were the better team over the first 45 minutes and might have felt a little aggrieved to be going in at the break on level terms after having missed a couple of decent chances and having an least half-decent shout for a penalty waved away, although it should also be added that, well, they weren’t exactly innocent bystanders to those missed chances themselves. Football retains a tendency to talk in these terms, with every positive intensely personal but every misplaced pass, screwball shot or marshmallow header talked about as though made by an alien species. But no, the chances that weren’t taken were not taken by Manchester United players.
All of this is only really a partial defence of Erik ten Hag’s team, because ‘winning the first half’ is worth precisely no points whatsoever—all the more so when even that doesn’t even take into account, I dunno, scoring more goals—and Manchester United categorically didn’t win the considerably more important second half, with a performance as sluggish as anything seen from a Manchester United team since his arrival, an extremely high bar to reach when we consider the state of some of their Premier League defeats last season. Add that to the grim Greenwood stuff of the last few days, and there’s a really rotten smell emanating from Old Trafford at the moment.
For the first time in at least four years, Spurs look like a plan coming together. It’s almost as though bringing in a head coach who gives the players encouragement and positive working environment produces better results than bringing one (or two) who don’t really seem to want to be there in the first place and whose first thought always seems to be to throw players under the bus to protect their own dwindling reputations whenever something goes wrong. Just a thought, like.
Spurs have got a long way to go but there is now something to hold onto again, and after the near-nihilistic cloud that seemed to descend over the club in the latter stages of last season that feels distinctly like a freshening gust of air. It’s fair to ask how Manchester United could have lost so abjectly to a team who’ve had not just the summer that Spurs have had, but also the spring and winter, too. What sort of a state do you have to be to find yourselves on the receiving end a defeat to them?
The most obvious answer to that is that Spurs don’t always sign three-legged horses in the transfer market. I have spent much of the summer idly wondering why there wasn’t something of a scramble for James Maddison, and felt somewhat vindicated by the end of Saturday evening’s match. Pape Matar Sarr had been previously misused by Ange Postecoglou’s predecessors, but actually played with something approaching the freedom that you’d want him to have. The same could very much be said for Yves Bissouma. Both players look transformed.
But the star of the show was Destiny Udogie, who impressed sufficiently on loan at Udinese last season to earn a season with his dysfunctional parent club and, on the basis of the two mature performances that he’s put in so far, is therefore effectively a new signing who’s flown under the radar a little, this summer. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Spurs have too many wing-backs, but this one has now put in two exceptional performances.
Top of the Premier League after two games, for what it’s worth (and the answer to that question, for the supporters of clubs who aren’t ever used to being there, might even be ‘quite a lot’, since we know fully damn well that The Money will have spoken by the following May), are Brighton & Hove Albion, whose 4-1 romp in the Black Country was their second 4-1 win of the season and puts them on target to score… *taps furiously into calculator*… 152 Premier League goals this season. No pressure, lads.
(It is also worth reminding ourselves that this Wolves team, who really were comprehensively brushed aside by Brighton on their own patch, came extremely close to taking a point from Old Trafford less than a week ago from a match in which they may have been the better team. Manchester United’s problems may run deep.)
Saturday night fever felt a little more like a Saturday night shrug of the shoulders as Manchester City beat Newcastle United 1-0. For non-supporters of these two teams, this is just one of those matches where you can’t really pick a side—UAE vs Saudi Arabia; really spoilt for choice there—and where the most desirable outcome, for both teams to lose and possibly for giant sinkholes to open up underneath both The Etihad Stadium and St James’ Park, is in turn both mathematically impossible and geologically highly unlikely.
Elsewhere in the Premier League, the #KloppOut-o-Meter turned up a few notches when Bournemouth took an early lead at Anfield, only to be dialled back again when they came back to win 3-1, with Alexis Mac Allister marking his home league debut by getting himself sent off, the big silly. Again, this is no real change to last season. Liverpool continue to be pretty good 80% of the time but then inexplicably poor for the remainder. And Brentford beat Fulham 3-0 at Craven Cottage, another solid performance from a team who are showing how best to function when suddenly and unexpectedly shorn of your best attacking player. It’s a lesson that Fulham now have to learn from.
At the top of the Championship, the blue shirts are ruling the roost. The top three are Ipswich Town, Leicester City and Birmingham City, with Ipswich and Leicester now being the only two with a 100% record after three games, but these performances have hardly been overbearingly dominant. Five of the six matches that Ipswich and Leicester have played so far have ended in one-goal victories, an early reminder of just narrow margins can get in this division
There were ten games played in the Championship on Saturday. Nobody scored more than two goals and only one team—third-placed Birmingham City—won by a margin of more than one goal. Leicester needed a stoppage-time winner from substitute Cesare Casadei to beat Cardiff City. Ipswich needed a goal from Conor Chaplin 15 minutes from time to squeeze past Championship crisis club du jour Queens Park Rangers. Southampton also needed stoppage-time to secure a 2-1 win at Plymouth. Might the influence of adding another quarter to matches be changing their flow? It certainly already feels a little like full-time doesn’t quite mean full-time in the way that it used to any more.
(In case you did happen to be wondering, the EFL scheduling a live televised match right in the middle of the Women’s World Cup final means that the Norwich vs Millwall match gets ignored. A tiny and obviously futile gesture on my part, but what else can you do? At least the Premier League had the sense to schedule their matches yesterday for after it finished.)
There are no teams with no points in League One any more, after the three clubs at the bottom of the table who’d started with three defeats all picked up a single point on the same day. But all of them dropped a place in the table nevertheless because Wigan picked up their third win in four, finally bringing to an end the reign of terror of the eight point deduction under which they started the season. They’re on two points now, while Burton Albion, Leyton Orient and Cheltenham Town all have one. With Fleetwood and Carlisle both losing, Wigan are up to 19th place in League One. Had it not been for that points deduction, they’d be a point clear at the top of the table.
The results in League Two read like someone wrote them while coming up on mescaline, with all appearing normal until the last couple of matches alphabetically. with Salford City winning 4-3 at Tranmere Rovers and Wrexham continuing their early season fever dream with a 5-5 draw against Swindon Town. A combined 26 goals from four matches—an average of six and half per game, which leaves them as the team who have both scored and conceded the most in the division, and by quite a margin— is clearly a rate that cannot be maintained, but which will the goals for column be first to diminish, or will be it the goals against? Stay tuned, only on Apple TV. Or Disney. It’ll be on one or the other.
The sole 100% record in the division now belongs to Gillingham, who have won all four of their matches 1-0, three of them away from home. At the other end of the table, there is also only one club with a 0% record so, uh, ‘congratulations’ to Colchester United, beaten 3-2 at home on Saturday, although it should be added that they do have a hand on those above them in the table.
The last 100% record of its season fell five minutes into stoppage-time at the end of the first National League match of the weekend between Chesterfield and Oldham Athletic, when James Norwood popped up five minutes into stoppage-time at the end of the match to score and rescue a point from a 1-1 draw for Oldham. And there are very early signs that the National League could be very tight again this season. Already, the top two—Barnet and Solihull Moors—are only separated by goals scored, while Oldham’s late, late goal dropped Chesterfield to third, by the massive distance of one goal on goal difference.
Sunday’s two Premier League matches maintained the weekend’s theme of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Quite literally, in one case.
Few expected Everton to take much from their trip to Birmingham to play Aston Villa after their opening weekend home defeat by Fulham, but their abject performance at Villa Park has brought about an early season rush of “Everton in crisis” articles. The volume is rising at Goodison Park for a club that cannot continue to circle the drain indefinitely without making significant structural changes. See? This is why there are so many “Everton in crisis” articles. They really do make it so easy.
(Seriously, it does perpetually feel as though there is something scandalous going on at that club. Alarm bells will continue to be sounded because a lot of people in football really *love* Everton in a way that transcends club loyalties, and it really does feel as though something is happening which is slowly killing that football club.)
There was little positive that Mauricio Pochettino could take from Chelsea’s trip to West Ham. If anything, the most striking thing about their performance was how similar it was to last season, only with the cast of characters having changed yet again. Chelsea became the first club to play two >£100m signings at the same time, but enjoyers of schadenfreude will be pleased to note that one of them missed a penalty while the other conceded one as West Ham cruised to a 3-1 win despite playing a quarter of the game a player down after Nayef Aguerd—who, having scored West Ham’s opening goal, was having a busy afternoon—was sent off for a second yellow card.
This prototype iteration of Chelsea are nice enough to look at. With 76% possession, they proved they can string a pass or two together. But well done, have a biscuit. Goals, as David Coleman famously (and, let’s face it, borderline incomprehensibly) once said, pay the rent, and having close to a quarter of a billion pounds worth of footballer doing pretty close to the exact opposite of that feels like a fairly reasonable summation of the first full twelve months of the club’s new ownership. Perhaps this match was their first annual review. Must try harder. Or less. One or the other.
The second year may include a little more investigation of what is actually going on behind the scenes at that club, because as time progresses it really does start to feel as though all cannot exactly be exactly as it seems at Stamford Bridge. In the meantime came another bad weekend on the pitch, a vivid reminder of how much work remains to be done at Chelsea, and the fact that there does come a point when you have to stop throwing money around and actually deal with the players that you’ve got.
Money will probably out. It usually does in the in end. But in the meantime, this was not a bad weekend for supporters of either Brighton or Spurs.