F365’s 3pm Blackout: Haaland hat-trick as Dyche exasperates and Hale End pair shine

Erling Haaland dealt Ipswich a dose of Premier League reality as Sean Dyche’s obsession with “experience” baffles and an ex-Arsenal pair did the business for Fulham.

Manchester City 4 Ipswich 1: Haaland gets tenth City hat-trick as Ipswich given three-minute dose of Premier League reality 
Fair to say Ipswich scored too early. The response from the champions was swift and brutal. Three minutes and 11 seconds it took them to turn a 1-0 deficit into a 3-1 lead as Erling Haaland stormed to the top of the Premier League goalscoring charts.

Sammie Szomdics put Ipswich ahead in the seventh minute with his first goal since his £9m move from Blackburn, squeezing the ball underneath Ederson having run on to a perfectly weighted through ball from fellow summer signing Ben Johnson. Pandemonium in the away end but hope was brief as Manchester City dealt the newly promoted side a harsh dose of reality.

Haaland converted a penalty after Savinho was brought down, Kevin De Bruyne took advantage of an error by king of the ricks Arijanet Muric, and then chipped a ball beautifully into the path of Haaland, who rounded Muric to finish with aplomb. Having gone toe-to-toe with Liverpool for an hour on the opening day, City at the Etihad was a whole new level. They looked shellshocked.

Fortunately for Ipswich, who looked at that point as though they may well be on the end of a thumping, having gone up through the gears in anger after going behind, City steadily went back down through them as the game wore on to save the Tractor Boys the embarrassment.

But Haaland is inevitable and the Norwegian striker turned and swivelled late on to smash the ball into the bottom corner to complete his tenth hat-trick in 101 appearances for City. Ridiculous.

Crystal Palace 0 West Ham 2: Wan-Bissaka sparks Hammers into life as Bowen does a Bowen
David Moyes has gone and new manager Julen Lopetegui has been furnished with £130m-worth of new signings, but it all looked very familiar in the first half. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Getting it wide and winning second balls is a tried and tested method, as Moyes proved. But we assume the Hammers chiefs had evolution in mind when they hired his replacement and we saw something different after the break.

Having been cruelly denied an outstanding goal on the opening day by a refereeing blunder, Eberechi Eze cracked the crossbar with a fine curling effort that had Alphonse Areola well beaten and it was Palace – the England international in particular – who provided the greater threat in the first half and will now be regretting their profligacy.

Niclas Fullkrug was introduced after an hour but it was fellow substitute and summer signing Aaron Wan-Bissaka who was crucial to the opener. The full-back so often criticised for his one-dimensional defensive football at Manchester United, danced past a couple of challenges in his own half before feeding Jarrod Bowen, whose ball into the box pin palled around before Tomas Soucek arrived (as he always seems to do) to slot his shot past Dean Henderson.

The Hammers were 2-0 up five minutes later and it was another new addition to the defence who created the opportunity brilliantly. Max Kilman stormed out of defence and breezed past players with the ball at his fit before feeding captain Bowen, who cut inside in typical fashion to smash hit shot inside the near post. From back to front in a matter of seconds, it was clinical.

Ismaila Sarr kissed the post with one effort and made a difference in general from the bench, but Lopetegui’s side saw the game without any great difficulty to hand the Spanish boss his first win in charge.

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Tottenham 4 Everton 0 – Dyche ‘experience’ argument continues to exasperate
Even in making the right decision, Sean Dyche’s explanation must have frustrated Everton supporters.

“It comes maybe a bit quicker than we’d like for him,” he said of the professional debut handed down to teenage Roman Dixon in the midst of a right-back selection crisis, “because we want him to learn from the other experienced players”.

It remains as curious an argument as it was last week, especially considering chief among “the other experienced players” at Everton provided Dixon with the opportunity to start at Tottenham. Ashley Young’s red card against Brighton only compounded a likely defeat which the club’s 30-somethings – James Tarkowski, Michael Keane, Idrissa Gueye and Abdoulaye Doucoure – were particularly powerless to prevent.

Dixon represented the only change to that limp and lackadaisical side in north London. Dyche’s argument will be that he wanted to give those players the chance to atone for their mistakes but the counter would be that Everton have invested too much this summer to persist with the same group that has been locked in a three-year cycle of relegation battles which seems certain to continue into another season.

Perhaps there was nothing anyone could really do to prevent an impressive Spurs side from exerting their dominance but the optics of a financially incontinent club spending such sums in the summer and not yet using those signings are uncomfortable. Jake O’Brien can be no worse than this. Jesper Lindstrom brings at least the pretence of something different. Iliman Ndiaye has to be worth a try.

The last thing Everton needed was their only consistently reliable “experienced player” to let them down. Dixon was arguably Everton’s best player but when his throw was returned to Jordan Pickford via a James Tarkowski back pass, the keeper’s poor touch and indecision was punished by Heung-min Son to make it 2-0.

That scoreline had not changed by the time Ndiaye and Lindstrom were introduced on the hour and the offer of 30 cursory minutes climbing uphill was never going to be enough either; the deficit was doubled rather than reduced by full-time as an otherwise “experienced” Everton defence conceded its seventh goal in two games.

Southampton 0 Nottingham Forest 1 – Saints no winners for meandering Martin
Two defeats to open their Premier League campaign should bring no shame on Southampton but it is difficult to imagine two more diametrically different yet equally damning games producing the exact same scoreline.

Away at Newcastle, Southampton had 19 shots to three. At home to Nottingham Forest, Southampton had five shots to 23. Russell Martin’s side were beaten 1-0 in both games as the most Championship of attacking options in Adam Armstrong, Ben Brereton Diaz and Cameron Archer have unsurprisingly struggled.

Saints had 78% of the ball at Newcastle and 65% against Forest. The suggestion was always that their style would produce performances of sterile domination with no cutting edge but expectation makes the reality no less harsh. It doesn’t half feel as though their current transfer direction of targeting a new goalkeeper is addressing an issue within the squad, but certainly not nearly the most pressing one.

Fulham 2 Leicester 1 – Hale End just the beginning for Cottagers
For the first time since October 2018, Emile Smith Rowe and Alex Iwobi won a game together as teammates. Neither player can pretend things have gone entirely to plan in the intervening years but Fulham might be the ideal place to fulfil their ambitions, at least in terms of playing opportunities.

Bernd Leno had the best seat in the house to watch Iwobi set up Smith Rowe’s first senior goal against Qarabag in the Europa League six years ago, and a fine vantage point from which to appreciate the brightest aspects of Fulham’s future against Leicester. The German was required to do ever so slightly more against Leicester than in Baku but the result was eventually the same.

Both players took their goals supremely well. Smith Rowe’s bursting run was found by Alex Iwobi before he finished confidently, while Iwobi tore down that same right-hand side of the Leicester defence before firing his shot in off Mads Hermandsen to restore the hosts’ lead after a Wout Faes equaliser.

Fulham were the better team but it was one of those games which could have gone either way. In those matches it is a handy trick to have two brilliant Hale End cast-offs on your side.