The Weekend, part one: it's surprising now quickly it becomes normalised, isn't it?

Chelsea lost at home to Aston Villa, and it was barely even commented upon. For how much longer can this possibly be or not be their 'new normal'?

Premier League now, EFL and non-league later. Sound good with you? Excellent. Let’s crack on, then.

It’s surprising how quickly it becomes normalised, isn’t it? In amongst Arsenal and Spurs cancelling each other out, Liverpool keeping their strong start to the season going, Brighton bouncing back from their European misadventure and Newcastle shellacking Sheffield United in their Arabian Peninsular Derby of the season, Chelsea losing at home to Aston Villa seemed to slip somewhat under the radar. Another 1-0 home defeat, another round of caterwauling at a refereeing decision. Another yellow card for Nicolas Jackson. This is what ‘business as usual’ looks like at Stamford Bridge, these days.

Jackson’s five yellow cards feel like a reasonable corollary for the state of Chelsea at the moment, none of them even collected for the momentary thrill of fouling the opposition. He now misses their trip to Fulham as a result of… stopping Aston Villa from taking a quick free-kick. Those looking on at this macabre sideshow from the sidelines with their “SICKOS” t-shirts on may even be a tiny bit concerned that Mauricio Pochettino, in being forced to shuffle his pack of diamond-encrusted jokers, could chance upon a formation which actually works.

This was no smash and grab. Aston Villa are a decent team, and they created other chances. Robert Sanchez made two outstanding saves from Lucas Digne and Nicolo Zaniolo in the first half to keep the score level at half-time, and Ollie Watkins’ winning goal was far from out of the blue. And for all the complaining over the second half sending off of Malo Gusto, with his name like an indeterminate item on a tasting menu, for an undisciplined foul on Lucas Digne, it does take a pair of blue-tinted spectacles not to be able to see why cracking into an opponents’ leg with the full weight of the sole of your boot might result in a red card.

These lapses only have to be slight or brief, but they carry a toll. Jackson and Gusto will now both be suspended, and there’s little sympathy to be had for the club that spent a billion pounds in the transfer market if they’re missing a couple of players on account of their own lack of self-restraint. Perhaps they should have spent the money… better? Sorry, I probably shouldn’t be questioning the wisdom of the money men. If the 21st century it’s taught us anything, it’s that they’re always the smartest people in the room.

Of course, you stick the boot into Chelsea because there wasn’t really anyone else to stick the boot into, this weekend. Manchester City glided past Nottingham Forest without significant hiccuping, while Liverpool kept pace, although their 3-1 win against West Ham was a slightly nervier affair, with the result not really confirmed until their third goal. Even Clubstatement United managed to clamber from their clown car to record a 1-0 win at Burnley, a win fuelled almost entirely by Bruno Fernandes and which otherwise gave little indication that United are going to improve in any substantial way. This was not the Saturday night fever that United-following viewers would have been hoping for, a win in name only.

It had become something of a common refrain that at least Pochettino has had the luxury of knowing that there were so many poor teams below Chelsea this season that they have something of a buffer again fears of relegation, and Burnley’s performance against Manchester United seemed to reaffirm that, but hold on a minute because HERE COME EVERTON, whose 3-1 win at Brentford on Saturday afternoon seems to have been greeted by something of a stunned silence.

Brentford. The happy club. The meditation room of the Premier League Hotel, where algorithms hum from the server rooms in the background as the club seeks to transcendententally meditate their way into the Europe Conference League, against Everton, Edvard Munch’s Scream re-interpreted as a football club. This… wasn’t supposed to happen? Heck, they even ended up as first on Saturday night’s Match of the Day, all of which led to a quick inspection that Adrian Heath wasn’t in their starting eleven. Nope, it is still 2023. We live in strange times.

Talking of results which half-feel like they came from the mid-1980s, Luton Town picked up their first point of the season with a 1-1 draw against Wolves. (Of course, the reason why these fixtures couldn’t fully be from 1985 is that neither Brentford nor Wolves were near the top flight in that year.) Nobody was expecting Luton to get zero points this season, and this particular home match might have been one from which they’d have been hoping to take all three points. They needed a red card and a penalty to get over the line—Gary O’Neil’s post-match response to it all was pretty much as you’d expect—but they got there in the end. Now, can they build on it?

All of which leaves Sheffield United. The death of Maddy Cusack last week has cast a shadow over the club, and it was disappointing that the Sky Sports coverage cut away from the pre-match tribute to her to go to a commercial break. As ever, when all that has to be done is treat women’s football as the men’s game would be treated, somebody, somewhere decides that it’s all just a little bit too much effort, or that it might cost just a bit too much money in lost advertising revenue.

For minutes the Blades held their own, but with the first goal of the afternoon came a complete collapse, to a point at which it might have been more fruitful had Paul Heckingbottom just selected eleven dustbins in Sheffield United supporters at strategically positioned places around the pitch. It finished 8[EIGHT]-0, and Newcastle finished the game with eight different goalscorers.

When this sort of result happens, it often feels like some sort of strange outlier. Southampton, for example, lost 9-0 twice under Ralph Hassenhuttl but were never relegated under him. In the season in which they did go down, they didn’t concede more than four goals in a single league match, but they did concede four goals on six occasions, which is considerably worse by every metric. Wigan Athletic conceded nine to Spurs in 2009/10, but they weren’t relegated that season, either.

But it can also… not be the case, as well. When Ipswich were beaten 9-0 by Manchester United in 1995, they finished the season 21 points adrift of safety. When Sheffield Wednesday were beaten 8-0 by Newcastle in September 1999 they didn’t end the season quite as far adrift as Ipswich had five years earlier, but they were still relegated and, arguably ominously for United, haven’t returned since.

Let’s be clear, here. Sheffield United hadn’t been especially bad this season, to this point. Manchester City needed an 88th goal to beat them, and Spurs needed goals in the 98th and 100th minutes to do the same. Prior to this match, and despite having only taken one point from their previous five matches (HERE COME EVERTON), they hadn’t conceded more than two goals in a single match or lost a match by more than a single goal. But on this occasion, from the point at which Newcastle scored their third goal, there was a feeling that this was a complete Sheffield United collapse.

Moreover, by the early stages of the second half, the stands at Bramall Lane were emptying at a worrying rate, and by the latter stages of the game only the away end seemed anything like full. Without a pot to piss in and having just avoided the attention of an extremely shifty-looking takeover indeed, this looks like being a year of attrition for Sheffield United; certainly on the pitch, and quite possibly off it, too. A quick note for Sheffield United supporters; don’t let this become normalised. That’s what happened to Wednesday in September 1999 and look at the state of them now.