Arsenal get the job done while Brighton revel in summer sun – F365’s 3pm Blackout returns
The return of the Premier League inevitably means the return of the Blackout, with a title favourite kept away from the TV glare on opening weekend but getting the job done while summer specialists Brighton are at it again.
Arsenal 2-0 Wolves: Saka and Havertz ensure title contenders do the necessary
Bukayo Saka had 25 goal contributions last season (16 goals, nine assists) and Kai Havertz 20 (13 and seven), and both men are already on two apiece this time around as the Gunners started their third attempt to unseat Manchester City by doing what was necessary against Wolves at the Emirates Stadium.
Arsenal will play better than this plenty of times this season, but this was the sort of comfy-enough home win over competent opposition on which title bids are built. City being City is really the only reason to expect Arsenal might not do it this time around. There are precious few faults left to find now in Mikel Arteta’s side, who have myriad attacking options; the Saka and Havertz show today notwithstanding, they are never going to find themselves entirely reliant on the vagaries of form and fitness of a single player.
But more compelling now is the defence. This really does now appear a team set up to concede vanishingly few goals. Maybe not Mourinho’s Chelsea levels of low, but quite possibly not far off. “It’s Arsenal” is very clearly no longer enough of a reason to cast doubt on what this team can achieve. The trouble is, “It’s City” may very well still apply in full.
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Everton 0-3 Brighton: Summer specialists Brighton up and running again
Maybe the Seagulls just like to feel the sun on their backs. Victory here at Goodison makes it six wins in their last eight games in August and September, while in 31 games between October and May last season they won only seven.
The reasons for Brighton’s collapse last season are many and varied, but one of them was without doubt the lengthy absences endured by Kaoru Mitoma. On his days one of the most effervescent and joyous of Premier League attackers, he played only two games in the second half of last season as the wheels fell so entirely off: a 5-0 win at Sheffield United and a 2-1 defeat at Tottenham in a game Brighton really should have had sewn up long before losing it to a 96th-minute Brennan Johnson goal.
He’s back now and opened the scoring in what was ultimately a thrashing but was for plenty of time far closer than that final scoreline suggested.
Absolutely no way, alas, of avoiding VAR in this one either. After all the ‘umpire’s call’ talk about raising the bar for overturning on-field decisions and placing the referee’s original call front and centre, it took less than an hour of a game in the opening round of fixtures for that to go tits skyward as technical problems meant Simon Hooper had to overturn his decision to award Everton a penalty after a coming together between Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Lewis Dunk based not on viewing the TV pictures himself but a “Trust me, bro” from Stockley Park.
There are valid reasons to think VAR may well be better – or at least markedly less sh*t – this season, but the fact semi-automated offside isn’t in place from the start is a poor look, and it really would have been helpful for everyone to have the first weekend at least go by without something going wrong. Everton, in truth, can really feel aggrieved only at the process rather than the outcome but it’s laughable just how shabby a product Premier League VAR remains after all this time.
Newcastle 1-0 Southampton: Ten-man Newcastle tough it out against promoted Saints
Last season’s opening-day win over Aston Villa was far more straightforward than this messy and fraught one against newly-promoted opposition but maybe that’s for the best given how illusory that opening victory was last season.
Going down to 10 men when still goalless and with more than an hour to play turned what appeared on paper a fairly straightforward opening task for a Newcastle side many expect to go well this season with no European commitments to distract and exhaust them into something quite fiendishly difficult.
But maybe it’s on days like these that you learn more about your team and your players than on the days when everything just goes right and very decent opponents get flattened.
If that is indeed the case, then Newcastle could on this evidence be in for quite a season, They’ve certainly been handed a tantalising fixture list full of possibilities for a fast start. They face Bournemouth next before hosting Tottenham in a fixture they’ve won handsomely and hilariously in each of the last two seasons with Wolves, Fulham and Everton among their next four opponents after that. Let’s just gloss over the fact the fourth are Man City; it’s still a chance to get themselves right in the mix at the business end from the beginning of the season. Especially with last season’s injury blight hopefully now as much a thing of the past as those dreadful Castore kits.
Nottingham Forest 1-1 Bournemouth: Nuno denied the luxury of opening-day win
If you place any stock at all in the famous F365 season predictions – and to be clear you should absolutely not do that – then Nuno Espirito Santo is a solid chance in the beloved Premier League Sack Race.
Pretty galling for him, then, to be offered up a tantalising glimpse of a pressure-easing opening-day win only to have it snatched away in the closing stages. It’s not as if Forest didn’t have chances to add to Chris Wood’s opening goal midway through the first half, either.
It’s a result that both teams might have taken before kick-off, but Forest could do with a decent number of points from what looks like a pretty gentle start to the season with Southampton and Wolves to come next before the difficulty ramps up with a trip to Liverpool. They could certainly have done without a hideous-looking injury for Danilo.
Bournemouth, meanwhile, will be relieved to have something to show for their opening day given a far tougher opening set of games with Newcastle, Chelsea and Liverpool all to come before September is out.