The Weekend Review: All Glitched Out

There was a familiar feel feel to things in the Premier League while below things are starting to get decided, although everyone's glitching out a bit at the moment.

I thought I’d do this week’s weekend review, on the Premier League for everyone, before we go down through the EFL, National League and even the Isthmian League. This piece will be open to all on Friday morning.

Are we starting to run out of plot points? Is the Premier League season just deflating before our very eyes? Because this weekend it felt as though teams were glitching and in varying different ways. Arsenal were held at home by Brentford, and no-one seemed to notice. Chelsea went two down to Ipswich. Even Newcastle made Manchester United look like a competent football team for 45 minutes. Nottingham Forest and Everton looked like equals.

Manchester City going two goals behind before coming back to win thanks to an imperious performance from Kevin de Bruyne made Saturday lunchtime feel like it was about 2018 again. Is this what happens when the burden of responsibility is lifted from his shoulders? Because he played as though exactly that had happened. Someone MLS club or other is going to bag themselves a bargain this summer, if he’s still capable of that sort of thing.

But the Saturday 3pms saw this trend continue elsewhere. Leicester City scored a goal. And then they scored another one. Brighton are starting to look as though they might be a little cooked at the moment and required the intervention of VAR twice for the penalty kicks that ultimately resulted in them coming away from the match with a point from a 2-2 draw. They’ve now only taken two points from their last five and have dropped to ninth.

At The City Ground, a late Abdoulaye Doucouré goal was enough for Everton to beat Nottingham Forest at the end of a match that yes, they probably did just shade. Doucouré made a point of his goal celebration being about the fact that he doesn’t appear to have been offered a new contract yet. We shall see whether that cri de coeur has its desired effect.

Some good news for Forest supporters came from Stamford Bridge, where Chelsea took until half-time to get going against Ipswich, who it feels just keep on blowing leads and otherwise promising positions. This time it was a 2-0 half-time league, eventually whittled away to a 2-2 draw. The gap between them and the cluster of clubs above them is now fourteen points. With six games to play, that is surely insurmountable.

The Premier League has subdivided into some peculiar coagulations over the course of this season, and the latest mini-league-within-a-league is the race from 13th to 17th. Just three points now separate Everton, Manchester United, Spurs, Wolves and West Ham.

West Ham were narrowly beaten away to the champions-elect, whose 2-1 win opened their lead at the top of the table to thirteen points. On this particular weekend, with the 36th anniversary of the Hillsborough being commemorated before kickoff, football felt a little more on the back burner than it would ordinarily have done. But West Ham had a bit of a go, and it probably would be a surprise to see them finish 17th.

The same cannot really be said for either Spurs or Manchester United, either of whom could easily drop to the bottom of this group. Spurs had been reasonably impressive in holding Eintracht Frankfurt to a 1-1 draw in the First Leg of their Europa League quarter-final on Thursday night, only to dispel anything like anything like a growth in optimism by literally throwing goals at Wolves on Sunday afternoon.

I feel as though I said as much as I had to say about the current condition of the club in my preamble for Thursday night’s live-blog. If anything, this was the performance that I was expecting on Thursday night. Defeat in a manner which can only reasonably be described as… Tottenhamesque. If anything, you start to feel like a bit of a sucker for being naive enough to believe that this could have worked in the real, harsh world. Perhaps there are things in life which we just don’t deserve. Maybe next season will be different.

And my season-long mantra of, “At least you don’t support Manchester United” continued to hold with their second-half performance in eventually losing 4-1 to Newcastle. Andre Onana ruined my pre-match preview by getting himself dropped, only for his replacement Altay Bayindir to gift Newcastle one of their second half goals.

The home side took a while to get going, and the half-time score of 1-1 was completely reasonable. But… oof. Manchester United were blown away in the second half by a team which had all the purpose, direction, energy and imagination that they’ve been lacking for, well, years. Winning the EFL Cup looks as though it may have cleared a blockage at Newcastle, and a return to the Champions League come the end of this season looks as likely as not.