Liverpool continue title cruise, Gunners cling on, Moyes bounces towards safety – it’s the F365 3pm Blackout
A rare Saturday afternoon with both Premier League title contenders in action ended in contrasting wins for both while Bournemouth flattened Nottingham Forest, Newcastle won again and the David Moyes good times continue at Everton.
Bournemouth 5-0 Nottingham Forest – Iraola’s rampant Cherries win battle of the managers of the year
We will accept an overwhelmingly good case for Arne Slot and a grudging one for Eddie Howe, but to our mind this was a game that pitted whare are at this time the two most impressive Premier League managers of the season against one another.
What Nuno Espirito Santo has done with Forest is the most compelling unlikely bit of big-boy bothering since The Leicester Fairytale, and the fact this result probably means going Full Leicester can now be ruled out is one that needs to be viewed in its very fullest context.
But today was about Andoni Iraola and his increasingly compelling Bourneouth side. They have recruited brilliantly and cleverly and made clear strides from last season, a campaign in which they had already made clear strides again from the clear strides Gary O’Neil had made the season before in the aftermath of Scott Parker departing with an angry shrug of the shoulders while insisting 9-0 defeats were impossible to avoid.
What Bournemouth have done in the last couple of weeks is truly wild, though. Newcastle and Nottingham Forest came into their games against Bournemouth as the two form sides in the division. Bournemouth have beaten them by an aggregate score of 9-1. It’s scarcely believable.
Dango Ouattara completing his hat-trick late in the game also means that Bournemouth players have now scored three of the last five Premier League hat-tricks. To put that in some kind of context, there have only been three Premier League hat-tricks scored by Fulham players ever.
Bournemouth now boast a very creditable six Premier League hat-tricks, which puts them in the company of far more seasoned Premier League teams. It’s only one fewer than Southampton, for instance, or two fewer than Leicester and West Ham. It’s only two fewer than Erling Haaland, for goodness’ sake.
These are great days for the Cherries.
Brighton 0-1 Everton – Toffees new-manager-bounce towards safety
There are few more precious phrases in the life of a relegation-threatened club than ‘back-to-back wins’. Everton’s latest success under the returning David Moyes was much more the type of success one might expect to see – a teak-tough display won from the spot – than the rather more freewheeling victory over Spurs at their most hilariously generous last weekend.
But it might be all the more important for that. This is the blueprint for how Everton go about securing survival this season, because other teams are not as stupid as Spurs and will not make Everton look like 2009 Barcelona. They will have to tough it out. That the penalty converted by the excellent Iliman Ndiaye was Everton’s first of the season seems more revealing than it maybe is.
What is undoubtedly significant, though, is the transformation in the league table over the last eight days. A one-point gap to the bottom three has ballooned to seven, with Spurs, West Ham, Manchester United and the relative security of ‘lower mid-table’ now firmly within range.
Liverpool 4-1 Ipswich – Slot Machine cruise on towards title number 20
It’s not just that Liverpool have a six-point lead and a game in hand at the top of the Premier League. It’s not just that they’re also top of the Champions League with a perfect record. It’s not just that they’re in the fourth round of the FA Cup and still favourites to make it through their Carabao semi-final against Spurs. It’s that they are doing all of this while appearing to expend far less effort than anyone trying to keep up with them.
We’ve seen Manchester City do this, of course, but it’s a slightly new thing from Liverpool. They were a great, great side under Jurgen Klopp but it absolutely did always look like a lot of work. Because it was a lot of work.
That Liverpool side would immediately come unstuck when they tried to coast through games. Klopp’s way demanded full speed to work, at which point it would generally work marvellously.
Liverpool are cruising through this first Slot season with something approaching nonchalance. Okay, Ipswich at home is not the toughest fixture on the calendar. But they have bothered plenty of teams this year. Only on relatively rare occasion have they been swatted aside with this kind of ease, and by a side theoretically feeling the effects of more midweek exertion with these still-weird-feeling January Champions League games.
Even today, the contrast between how easily Liverpool secured their three points and the hard-working difficulty of Arsenal’s can only work one way as the season rumbles on towards its final straight. Right now, everything is coming up Liverpool.
Southampton 1-3 Newcastle – Isak confirms what we already know and Tonali finally gets a second Premier League goal
Sandro Tonali’s first Premier League goal came on his debut, when he delivered a showstopping masterclass of a midfield performance in a 5-1 thrashing of Aston Villa that gave an entirely misleading picture of how the two teams’ seasons would pan out.
A lot has happened since that goal and Tonali’s second Premier League goal today in another come-from-behind win at doomed Southampton. Tonali was banned for all but the first nine games of his first season in England and understandably took some time to get going when he did return after the first two games of this campaign.
But he has long since worked his way up to top gear, with his work alongside Bruno Guimaraes and Joelinton in Newcastle’s engine room a huge factor in a run that now stands at seven wins in eight games in the league and 10 wins in 11 overall.
Another huge factor in that run has been Alexander Isak. He scored two more today to take his Premier League season tally to 17 – 13 of those in his last 10 games – and confirm once again that he is currently the most complete centre-forward in England. Newcastle will be accepting no phone calls over the next week or so, one imagines.
Wolves 0-1 Arsenal – Huge win as Gunners cling on for dear life in the title race
Arsenal are not, it would be fair to say, making life easy for themselves at this time. They spent much of this awkward afternoon in Wolverhampton a man short after Myles Lewis-Skelly’s controverial red card, and only found the winner after Joao Gomes’ far more straightforward pair of yellow cards levelled out the numbers.
But they’re still there. It’s hard to think of the last time Arsenal had a truly comfortable domestic game. They have drawn games carelessly, been well beaten by Newcastle in the Carabao, taken to penalties and then seen off by 10-man Manchester United in the FA Cup and all the league wins they have managed recently have been as fraught as this one. They couldn’t even beat Spurs convincingly, and even Everton can (pretty much) do that.
Failure to win today would have felt terminal, given the ease with which Liverpool were doing their bit at home to Ipswich in a rare Saturday 3pm title double-header. Eight points clear with a game in hand would have been too much. Even the Liverpool fans dread afeared of being called bottlers or pretending the Trent Alexander-Arnold badinage overshadows everything would have had to accept it was now pretty much done.
Arsenal have dug deep and stayed just about in there. Next weekend’s game against a still wildly unpredictable Man City should be a doozie.