Mikel Arteta 10th, Ten Hag 21st in Premier League manager rankings

Two months, two sackings and approximately four million Premier League games since the last update, we revisit the manager rankings. Not wholesale change at the basement or the summit, but some notable climbers and fallers nonetheless alongside a pair of new entries.

November’s almost entirely incorrect assessments can be found here to give you a rough idea of how much stock to place in the many thousands of words that follow. Rankings from that dark and distant long forgotten time are in brackets here…

 

22) Vincent Kompany, Burnley (20)
Going tits up, isn’t it? Didn’t expect it, did we? Probably, though…maybe we should have a little bit? Teams that play their way out of the Championship and into the Premier League with flowing, possession-based football are likely to be the ones in line for a culture shock when they get a taste of the Barclays, and doing all that under a rookie manager should have sounded more alarm bells than it did.

The widespread delusion – of which we must admit to being an enthusiastic contributor – was that Kompany knew Our League and thus Burnley would be fine. But he had no managerial experience of the Premier League and – this bit has turned out to be absolutely crucial – none of his extensive and impressive playing experience was in the relevant area of Barclays for a newly promoted team that likes to play its football The Right Way.

A team that rinsed the Championship sits five points from safety. Unlike their fellow promoted sides who currently make up the bottom three, Burnley were the ones for whom it wasn’t meant to be like this. Burnley are the ones who were meant to be better. And it all puts Kompany under serious pressure if he can’t crack the code soon.

We wrote all that in November. And every word of that still applies. There was also a bit in there back then about them scoring fewer goals than anyone else and conceding very nearly as many as Sheffield United. To give Kompany some credit, his team did sort both of those things out in one game.

 

21) Erik Ten Hag, Manchester United (19)
We said it in November and we’ll say it again. They are a rubbish team playing rubbish football by almost any reasonable measure for anyone. And that’s before we even get to the fact that This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. Ten Hag has even spent much of his time this season pointing out to anyone who’ll listen that he can’t be expected to play his Ajax-style football here in this league with these players, which was presumably news to the club that hired him to do just that.

Ten Hag’s side made a complete, catastrophic mess of a reasonably kind Champions League group and remain closer to the bottom half than the top six. Yes, they’ve been without some key players but so has everyone else and frankly not even Chelsea – given last season’s shambles and a new manager – could reasonably be said to be underperforming against pre-season expectations more than United.

There are two things most jarring about United under Ten Hag. The first is the dreariness. They remain by a wild margin the lowest-scoring team in the top half, languishing 11 goals behind West Ham and at least 20 – a goal a game FFS – behind Liverpool, Villa, City and Spurs. Ten Hag’s side have scored the same number of Premier League goals as a Crystal Palace team once again asserting itself as the division’s most forgettable under Roy Hodgson. They’ve scored fewer goals than Luton. This cannot be normalised or accepted.

But worse for Ten Hag and United is the apparent utter and total inability to put together a run of even two or three results to offer any kind of encouragement that things are going to get meaningfully better. And, if anything, they are only growing more committed to a policy of one step forward, two steps back as the Dutchman flails around for some kind of firm ground on which to build..

Spangle Everton 3-0? Grand, let’s follow that with a ludicrous 3-3 draw against Galatasaray and meek surrender at Newcastle. Beat Chelsea with a season’s-best performance? Lose successive home games 3-0 to Bournemouth and 1-0 to an already qualified Bayern side that could barely be bothered. Battle and scrap with every straining sinew for a point at Anfield? Lose at West Ham. Comeback for the ages against Villa? Lose at Nottingham Forest.

Their next two league games are at home against Tottenham and away to Wolves. If you can’t already see precisely how that goes, then we simply cannot help you.

READ: Man Utd wasters join king Van Dijk in grim list of all 17 £70m-plus Premier League signings

 

20) Mauricio Pochettino, Chelsea (13)
The most damning thing for Pochettino at the moment is not just the results (although it is also the results) but his apparent lack of authority. Being Chelsea manager feels almost entirely like something that is happening to him rather than something over which he has any kind of meaningful control.

It’s not really remotely fair to compare his current Chelsea side to the Spurs one he moulded in his image but we’re going to do it anyway because it does feel instructive. You knew exactly where you stood with that Spurs team. You knew what they were about, what they stood for, how they wanted to play. It didn’t always work, but it did work really quite a lot for really quite a long time and when it did it was in identifiably repetitive ways. You would watch that Spurs team and be under no doubt it was Pochettino’s men doing Pochettino’s bidding.

There’s none of that now. Nothing about Chelsea suggests ‘Aha, yes, there’s a Pochettino team doing its thing’. Does he make any difference whatsoever? It’s pretty damning to even be able to ask that question of a manager, but it feels valid. Would/could Chelsea be doing any worse without him? They occasionally win games here and there, because of course they do. They have some very good footballers. There is a bedrock level of adequacy below which it is impossible for a club of that size to dig without something pretty close to active sabotage. But Chelsea are whacking their spades into that bedrock level really, really hard under Pochettino.

The Carabao semi-final first-leg defeat at Middlesbrough will likely be corrected in the second, but it really doesn’t help the idea of a swirling storm in which Poch is but a baffled if intrigued bystander as the sack chat increases in volume and intensity once more.

At the moment it kind of feels like it’s not so much a question of whether replacing Poch with literally anyone else might make Chelsea better, but whether it would even be possible that doing so might make them tangibly worse. And that’s not good at all, is it? The idea that you might be doing as bad a job as it is possible to do under the circumstances?

There is rich Barclays heritage in beloved Chelsea managers going to Spurs and failing, but Poch’s reversal might outdo the lot of them. At least Mourinho and Conte made things happen at Spurs, even if it might have sometimes been better had they not. Poch’s Chelsea career is just great big nothing.

 

19) Steve Cooper, Nottingham Forest – August-December (6)
Yeah, fair enough, sixth was way too high. Still, though: does show quite how much football has been played since mid-November. What we like best about our November verdict beyond its air of general misplaced optimism is how close we came to getting it exactly right before getting it completely wrong. Look…

What’s good about Forest is that unlike some of the other clubs in the cavernous mid-table, it does retain an air of jeopardy. At Forest it really does feel like it could all fall apart and they could go 20 games without a win or something. They won’t, though. Because Cooper.

Ah! Well. Nevertheless, etc. Probably did need to go because the life had gone alarmingly from Cooper’s side, and the early evidence is already there that Nuno has at the very, very least got a dead cat bounce out of them. Still all seems a bit of a shame, but the fans still love him for bringing back some joy and having a rock-solid place in the managerial pantheon of a Brian Clough club isn’t a bad old legacy.

 

18) Eddie Howe, Newcastle (15)
In November we came pretty much as close as libel laws will permit to baselessly accusing Howe of being a serial killer and things have, if anything, got worse since then.

Howe’s Newcastle have crashed out of Europe altogether, spaffed away an enormously presentable silverware opportunity in the Carabao and drifted entirely out of contention in the league. They did lift the mood by comfortably dispatching Sunderland but it’s really not been good enough at all this season. Yes, Howe had the team markedly ahead of schedule last season but that doesn’t really help when the regression is as stark as this.

At their best they remain a potent threat to the very best, but the consistency of last season has gone. Significantly, the defensive solidity that marked them out as a serious side last term has evaporated completely. A team that lost only five league games last season has already been beaten nine times. A team that conceded only 33 goals in 38 games has leaked 29 in 20.

The inconsistency is maddening. It really is hard to square the side that racked up impressive home wins against Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United in November and early December with the one that has managed only one Premier League win in six games since then.

But it’s the nature of their recent defeats that really sets alarm bells ringing: they’ve conceded 15 goals in their last six league games, culminating in a 4-2 loss at Liverpool in which they were pulverised into xG oblivion. Still, respite is at hand: City and Villa, top and joint second respectively in the goals scored tally, next. Howe really might be f***ed, you know.

 

17) Thomas Frank, Brentford (11)
In November, we lamented the fact that Frank and Brentford, an undoubted breath of fresh air in their first two seasons of Barclays, had been entirely forgettable this season. Oh, to be anonymous. They’d love to be forgotten and unnoticed in mid-table now, because since we realised we couldn’t remember a single Brentford game they’ve managed to beat only Luton while losing to absolutely everyone else.

We still can’t remember any of their games, but now they’re suddenly right in the middle of a relegation fight and with an awful lot riding on Ivan Toney coming to the rescue and a) not buggering off to another club and b) being pretty much instantly as good again as he was before eight months out of the game.

Brentford’s invisibility means there has still been almost no attention on Frank despite this slump – and it’s worth noting that Frank and the Bees arrested such a slide in their first Premier League season (albeit with a bit of Christian Eriksen assistance). But that could change: their next league game is a huge six-pointer against Forest, currently enjoying a significant new-manager bounce, with four of the next five against top-six sides in Spurs, City, Liverpool and West Ham.

Entirely conceivable that by early March Frank is very visible indeed in a serious relegation soup and, far more importantly, sliding even further down this list.

 

14) Paul Heckingbottom, Sheffield United – August-December (14)
We were, in hindsight, a touch generous in November towards a team and manager with five points after 12 games. Our decision to focus more closely on the unfortunate narrow defeats to your Tottenhams, Citys and Uniteds than the thrashings against the Newcastles and Arsenals Of This World was shown to be a wildly optimistic daftness by the unforgivable unpleasantness against Burnley, a result from which there really was no way back for Heckingbottom.

Especially given the presence of Chris Wilder by that point lurking not so much in the shadows as in the full glare of multiple spotlights and a big flashing neon sign saying THIS FELLA WANTS YOUR JOB with all arrows pointing at him.

 

15) Chris Wilder, Sheffield United – December onwards (NE)
The Blades have almost as many points from Wilder’s six games in charge as they managed in Paul Heckingbottom’s 14, so it’s hard to say things haven’t improved. But also it has to be noted that they have improved only to a level that remains quite rubbish, and that the Boxing Day home defeat to Luton in a game they led 2-1 with 14 minutes to go is probably a more significant and damaging result than the 8-0 against Newcastle or even the 5-0 at Burnley on Heckingbottom’s watch.

Wilder had been lurking as United’s Plan B long before actually getting his old job back but we are going to quite quickly need to see more evidence than a win over freefalling Brentford before we make any bold claims about a significant moving of the needle on the Blades’ hopes of a great escape.

 

14) Roy Hodgson, Crystal Palace (16)
We remain deeply annoyed that Crystal Palace, the most boringly reliable Premier League team of the last decade, had a brief flirtation with something a bit more uncertain and thus exciting under Patrick Vieira before retreating instantly into the familiar embrace of Hodgson when it got a tiny bit dicey. We’re not saying that it was wrong to bin off Vieira – by all accounts, that was a relationship that had entirely broken down. Just that it didn’t have to mean a return to Hodgson and the same old, same old.

Now, a team that has finished somewhere between 10th and 15th with a points total in the 40s in each of the 10 seasons since their return to the top flight is currently to be found 14th with a PPG that would deliver 39.9 points. Which is basically 40 with a little bit of rounding, isn’t it?

And are they boring? You’d better believe they’re boring. Second best defensive record in the bottom half, but fewer goals scored than anyone bar the bottom two. Even Manchester United have scored as many as Palace. Grim.

 

13) Marco Silva, Fulham (17)
Seems only fair that former yo-yo clubs get at least a couple of years’ grace for bobbing around in mid-table before we start airily dismissing them as boring. Palace have been at it for a decade. And Palace don’t go around occasionally pulling back-to-back 5-0 wins out of thin air to keep us all on our toes. Silva’s Fulham do. And he has also steered them into the Carabao semi-finals, which is worth noting, while you’d currently have to give them every chance in a home FA Cup fourth-round meeting with Newcastle.

Fulham were always going to have to adjust to a post-Mitrovic world and there was every reason to expect it might be more painful than this, so Silva deserves at least a passing grade at this point.

 

12) Nuno Espirito Santo, Nottingham Forest – December onwards (NE)
Early days, but enormously encouraging ones for Forest and the former Wolves and Tottenham boss. Genuinely nice to have him back in the Barclays after all that Spurs unpleasantness and he’s set about the awkward task of replacing a beloved manager of a team in the doldrums with relish.

Defeat to a last-minute winner in his first game against Bournemouth was sub-optimal, but ample mitigation was provided by the absurd red card shown to Willy Boly in the first half of that one. And even with 10 men and in eventual defeat there were encouraging signs.

Those signs are now not so much encouraging as great big flashing neon bastards after a 3-1 win at Newcastle in which Chris Wood became only the fourth player to score a Premier League hat-trick against a former club (the other three are at the bottom of the article, fact fans) and a 2-1 win over silly old Manchester United.

The bounce has duly been achieved; next task to prove it is more than that of a dead cat.

 

11) Roberto De Zerbi, Brighton (9)
The thrilling novelty of giving European heavyweights the runaround in the Europa has quite rightly kept the mood high at Brighton and avoided any particular spotlight falling on a league campaign that is currently okay but not really any more than that.

It obviously says a great deal about the trajectory of both clubs that Brighton finding themselves above Manchester United after 20 games now merely constitutes ‘okay’ but it’s hard to escape the notion they’re not quite as good – domestically – as they were last season as the challenge of managing a squad through those European games took its toll.

It’s a blunt instrument to deploy, but not since beating Bournemouth after losing to AEK Athens in their first Europa League game have Brighton managed to follow a Thursday night adventure with three points on a Sunday. Defeats at Arsenal and even Chelsea aren’t appalling, and a home draw with Liverpool is fine. But post-Europa home draws against Fulham and Sheffield United do stick out a bit more.

Don’t have that to worry about for a bit now, at least, and there’s also a promising looking run of games in which to put themselves back in the top six picture, while De Zerbi remains the current Premier League boss most likely to be coveted by elite clubs pooping themselves into making a managerial change, which will remain forevermore the blessing and curse of Brighton’s success. The worry for Brighton here is the sheer number of such clubs who potentially fit the bill at this time.

READ: Six managers waiting for Man Utd and Newcastle to sack sitting ducks Ten Hag and Howe

 

10) Mikel Arteta, Arsenal (8)
Arsenal are not, in the parlance of our times, in a good moment. The brutal nature of the Busy Festive Period has never been more evident than in sending an Arsenal team top of the pile on Christmas Day tumbling all the way to fourth by New Year’s Day after back-to-back defeats to West Ham (touch unfortunate, One Of Those Days) and Fulham (miserably dreadful).

Also now out of the FA Cup after a very silly 2-0 defeat to Liverpool that highlighted once again just how really quite alarmingly bad Arsenal are at scoring goals when the referees aren’t just giving them penalties every week out of their keen sense of overprotectiveness when it comes to Bukayo Saka. On the subject of whom, if Arsenal are really worried their Starboy’s long-term health and safety they might want to have a bit of a think about a manager who seems utterly unable to even countenance selecting a team that doesn’t include the 22-year-old.

Arteta and Arsenal now face a battle of nerve and skill to keep themselves in the title race and avoid awkward questions about how they’ve managed to get worse after adding the precise £100m player the club has seemingly been crying out for since the Vieira times. Absolutely wild if it turns out that player really actually was Granit Xhaka all along.

READ: Arteta below Howe, Klopp third in ranking of Premier League managers by career transfer spend

 

9) Sean Dyche, Everton (7)
There’s an element of coincidence about it with the nature of the way fixtures have fallen, but also something undeniably Dycheian about a team railing against adversity and embarking on an F-you run of four straight wins to wipe out the perceived injustice of a 10-point penalty only to then turn round, point made, and lose the next three straight games. Dyche and Everton need to find a way to get that belly fire burning more consistently without the need for a 10-point penalty every couple of months, because to be honest that feels like a largely unsustainable strategy.

But the current results blip that has also seen Carabao hopes extinguished and an unwanted FA Cup replay against Crystal Palace secured should not mask the fact that Dyche has turned Everton from relegation battlers into a mid-table team, albeit a mid-table team that remains maddeningly unable to fully extricate themselves from the relegation scrap. No side one point clear of the bottom three at the halfway stage of the season has ever felt safer than Everton, but it would be nice if they could just make that a bit clearer over the coming weeks.

 

8) Rob Edwards, Luton (12)
Not many teams and managers would be happy to find themselves in a relegation fight halfway through the season, but Edwards and Luton fit that bill. Because the only realistic alternative for the Hatters was ‘already doomed’. They are distinctly undoomed and are currently making a far better fist of things than either of the bigger, better-resourced clubs who came up with them.

For that, Edwards deserves huge credit. Crucially, they’ve very rarely been truly outclassed. Since back-to-back three-goal defeats to Brighton and Chelsea in August, only once have Luton lost by more than a single goal: at a very good Aston Villa in October. That ability to stay in games gives them hope and shows Edwards to be a canny operator.

The best thing for Edwards and Luton, though, is that unlike their relegation rivals their survival blueprint is crystal clear. Brighton, Manchester United and Aston Villa are the only top-half teams left to visit Kenilworth Road in the second half of the season. Luton have yet to lose by more than a solitary goal at home all season despite facing most of the top sides. They’ve drawn against leaders Liverpool and beaten Newcastle. Nine huge home games left, and not a single one where you can now write the Hatters off. Fair play. The flipside of course is an absolutely brutal run of away games in the second half of the season, but tits to that.

 

7) Pep Guardiola, Manchester City (5)
Tricky to place him here, isn’t it? A club that has made a habit of winning title after title under the best manager in the game really should objectively be walking the league this year given the flaws displayed by everyone else. But they’re third and showing plenty of flaws of their own.

With Pep, though, we always feel like the apparent sight of City struggling is just one of his galaxy brain games. Bit of rope-a-dope playacting. We’d swear he does it just to toy with everyone, just to feel alive. City really haven’t been great at all this season, and not even the returns of Kevin De Bruyne and Erling Haaland should really be enough to make you think they’re about to go on one of those 14-game winning runs that leaves everyone else suddenly eight points adrift.

Yet here we are, fully expecting City to go on one of those 14-game winning runs that leaves everyone else suddenly eight points adrift. He’ll be top of this list by March, the clever sod.

 

6) Andoni Iraola, Bournemouth (18)
Well that all changed tremendously quickly, didn’t it? The early encouraging signs were there in November when we noted that Bournemouth had climbed out of the bottom three and ‘should feel confident of that remaining the case’. What we definitely meant to add there but simply didn’t have space for was ‘because they’re going to win five and draw one of their next six’. So just pretend we did say that, yeah? Let’s all agree that that is definitely what we meant.

It’s been an absolutely stonking run from Bournemouth, one that absolutely vindicates their bold decision to go with Iraola after and despite all Gary O’Neil did to keep them up last year. It was a decision we supported at the time, and lord knows we were feeling pretty nervous about it by the end of October. So we can only imagine what the mood was like in the Dean Court boardroom, but it’s trebles all round now.

It isn’t completely a case of 20:20 hindsight to say it was always likely to take a bit of time for Iraola to imprint and implant his ideas on this group of players but let’s not any of us pretend we expected the start to be quite so traumatic nor the recovery quite so remarkable. Bournemouth’s first nine games brought no wins, three draws and six defeats. Their last 10 have brought seven wins and points dropped against only City, Villa and Spurs. Tremendous.

 

5) David Moyes, West Ham (10)
Probably a touch low in November, a recent run of four winless games in the Premier League prompting a smidge of recency bias on our part, although we did describe things as being ‘broadly fine’.

Better than that now, though, with the Hammers sauntering through the Europa League group stage with the cigars out and now into the top six. If Moyes received and deserved criticism for somehow getting this upper-mid-table group of players into a relegation scrap last season, then he must receive and deserve praise for getting them into the European picture this time.

It’s now mid-January and Moyes’ side retain two realistic routes into the Champions League. It’s not normally like this at West Ham, and it remains quite jarring to see a West Ham side performing this well while uncertainty remains about the long-term future of a manager with legit claims on being their best of the Premier League era. It’s still hard to shake the idea that there is something about Moyes that just isn’t quite West Ham enough, despite the fact they currently appear to be made for each other.

 

4) Gary O’Neil, Wolves (4)
In November, we said this:

We were wrong about Wolves and wrong about O’Neil. It takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong. That, or someone who is absolutely bang to rights and has absolutely nowhere to go. Thought they’d be dreadful, thought he’d taken a hospital pass in taking over when Julen Lopetegui huffed off on New Season’s Eve but O’Neil has Wolves cosily in mid-table.

More important than any of that, O’Neil has also joined the all-important club of current Premier League managers who have Spoke Well, I Thought on Monday Night Football. He’s in the gang now, the ranging party for the next generation of British firefighter managers to be brought in whenever Jonny Foreigner can’t handle the Barclays heat.

It’s nice when two months later we can just nod along to our own words and go, yeah, same. Rather than the more usual reaction of cringing out a lung while thinking what an irredeemable f***ing idiot we were two months ago and – most importantly – learning absolutely no lessons from that.

One addendum to the November summary is to note that O’Neil has currently made Wolves – Wolves, for goodness sake – the leading scorers in the bottom half of the Premier League, which is essentially witchcraft. We’re barely halfway through and they need just one goal to match last season’s total of 31 and, you know what? We reckon they’ll do it. More than that, we think they’ll probably even go past that total. Yeah, you heard us.

 

3) Ange Postecoglou, Tottenham (2)
It’s a little bit of a cop-out to constantly talk about the vibes at Spurs. It’s a conveniently ineffable and unquantifiable metric that allows one to avoid giving more serious scrutiny to what’s actually happening. It nevertheless remains by far the most important one when measuring Postecoglou’s instant transformative impact on this silliest of football clubs.

It’s been miserable here for years. It’s not truly been a happy place since the Pochettino era (and that was grim by the end). Even when the team has made one of its occasional lurches towards the Quite Good more recently, it’s not been the same. The run to nick a top-four place off Arsenal under Antonio Conte really was excellent – and the football during that time far better than it’s now given credit for due to the irredeemably turgid sufferball he inexplicably chose to inflict on everyone the season after. But it was always transitory. It was never going to last long with Conte even if the speed and scale of the breakdown took us all by surprise.

But most of all, Conte was never, ever going to be a manager who was in love with the club. The air, even in the good times, was very much ‘you should be grateful I’m lowering myself to this’. On the back of Jose Mourinho’s even more abject miserabilist gaslighting, this was a club and fanbase on its knees.

Postecoglou, with his at times almost sarcastic commitment to front-foot aggression, his fondness for using the word ‘mate’ and the simple yet crucial ability to sometimes talk the club up rather than down, has changed everything. And it really is likely to only get better. Postecoglou has been handed a half-finished squad, seen the club sell its greatest ever player just before the season started, watched that half-baked squad ripped to shreds by injuries and suspensions, and still positioned it on the fringes of the title race with barely a word of complaint about any of the misfortunes.

And clearly, the results are a big part of the Angeball cult that is growing at Spurs. But there’s so much more to it than that: it really is a mood. And it’s a mood exemplified near perfectly by the fact Spurs have, during Postecoglou’s brief reign, sold Harry Kane and replaced him with Timo Werner and the vibes have never been better.

As always when discussing the Ange phenomenon, we invite anyone with access to a Delorean or similar time-travelling device to go back to May last year and convey these facts to a Spurs fan to gauge their reaction. It is by far the best and most worthwhile use of time-travel technology we can think of.

 

2) Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool (3)
While talk of the sheer boggling size of his cojones has been recently overstated, the job he’s currently doing at Liverpool has not. This is meant to be a season of transition at Anfield, a necessary but Saudi-hastened midfield overhaul combined with an attack and defence still coming together themselves leaving Liverpool surely a touch short once again of the very best the division had to offer.

Not a bit of it. In a Premier League season where the overall standard in terms of depth is high it would be fair to say the standards right at the summit have dipped a bit from recent years. Peak Man City would not allow this Liverpool to be three points clear at the summit, surely. But that’s on them, not Klopp. They’re great to watch as well, this Liverpool team. They still at times have the heavy metal football of old but there’s a frailty there too. The paradox is that in revealing this frailty they and Klopp have also revealed their strength. They go behind an awful lot. They still very often win.

In a season where everyone else has already lost at least three times, Liverpool still have just the one reverse on their ledger, and that particular game was, it would be fair to say, absolutely f***ing ridiculous.

They’ve sauntered through the Europa League group stage, have eyes on the Carabao final and have knocked Arsenal out of the FA Cup. It’s hard really to see how this season could have gone much better for Liverpool, given where it began and good processes notwithstanding.

 

1) Unai Emery, Aston Villa (1)
Just doing a brilliant job. Perhaps the most compelling part is how quickly he’s normalised Villa once again being this good. It’s true you don’t have to go all that far back into ancient Barclays folklore to find some very decent Villa teams, but it’s also true that they were quite shit for quite a long time since then. Now they’re in Europe which seems perfectly fine and sitting, almost a third of the way through the season, just a point outside the top four without anyone thinking this particularly odd or even noteworthy any more.

It’s just a very good manager doing a very good job with what he has turned into a very good team. We should cherish it, really, because this sort of thing doesn’t happen all that often.

The concern on the horizon will inevitably be that Emery’s work at Villa means that he’ll be right at the top of the list for any Big Six side other than Arsenal that decides their manager has sufficiently f***ed it and a change needs to be made, but it doesn’t really feel like an imminent threat. Emery has experienced Big Six Premier League life already; he’d have to be a crazy person to swap what he has going on at Villa right now for the big chair at the madhouses of Chelsea, United or even Newcastle should such opportunity arise.

READ: Aston Villa dominate transfer value XI outside Premier League Big Six (and Newcastle)

 

Premier League hat-tricks against former clubs: Andy Cole (for Manchester United against Newcastle), Marcus Bent (for Wigan against Blackburn), Josh King (for Watford against Everton), Chris Wood (for Nottingham Forest against Newcastle)