Champions League race: Isak > Shearer, Monchi genius, Grealish at No.10 and Bournemouth f*** it
Alexander Isak scored to expose Alan Shearer’s fraudulence while Monchi rubbed his hands with glee at the Amex, Jack Grealish scored from his natural position and Bournemouth are sh*t again as the fastest snail race for the Champions League continued.
Newcastle 2-1 Brentford: Alexander Isak > Alan Shearer
Alexander Isak scored again, neatly side-footing home Jacob Murphy’s cross, to cause further balling of fists by Arsenal fans amid new sporting director Andrea Berta’s supposed transfer focus on the wrong free-scoring striker and to further put Alan Shearer in his place after Richard Keys hit out at one of the city’s favourite sons this week for ‘celebrating success he had nothing to do with’.
Isak’s goal took him to 20 for the season, making him the first Newcastle player in Premier League history to score 20+ goals in successive seasons after 21 last term. Shearer had four such campaigns in 1996/97, 1999/2000, 2001/2002 and 2003/2004, slacking off (being injured) in between.
Bryan Mbeumo levelled from the spot but Sandro Tonali ensured Newcastle finished the night in that now coveted fifth spot with a cross that Pat Nevin reckons he may have meant as a shot “because he pinged it”. He was by the corner flag, Pat.
Brighton 0-3 Aston Villa: Monchi’s Night
Berta would do well to have a word with fellow sporting director Monchi ahead of deciding how to spend his £300m at Arsenal this summer.
We would have given Marcus Rashford a 50/50 chance of succeeding at Aston Villa following his loan move from Manchester United in January and would have had Marco Asensio at around 70/30 in favour of him being a big ol’ flop, mainly due to a deeply-held and evidently nonsense belief that Players Like Him Aren’t Physical Enough For Our League.
Asensio scored his eighth goal in ten appearances at a ludicrous rate of one every 60 minutes, again arriving in the box to place the ball perfectly into the corner, as he appears to be doing most of the time he’s on a football pitch. He had come off the bench as one of what we must now sickeningly refer to as The Villa Finishers because calling him or Ollie Watkins a substitute doesn’t do justice to the now absurd strength in depth that Unai Emery has at his disposal.
Watkins replaced Rashford, who scored his third goal following his brace in the FA Cup, to add to his three assists and an England recall in a Villa shirt. Not bad at all, and such is his form that we are perfectly willing to accept that what we would definitely have called a fluffed finish had he still been wearing red may in fact have been a purposeful bobble over the goalkeeper, a la Mesut Ozil.
And as if the night was designed to highlight the genius antics of their transfer supremo, £19m January signing Donyell Malen, who has been a blot on Monchi’s copybook, wrapped up the victory with a rifled shot on the angle into the far corner to see Villa leapfrog Brighton into seventh place.
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Bournemouth 1-2 Ipswich: Tottenham links see Cherries limp out of race
Having beaten Newcastle 4-1 and Nottingham Forest 5-0 at the end of an 11-game unbeaten run, Bournemouth have won one game – against Southampton – and lost five (leaving them low in the form table), with this latest and most embarrassing defeat to Championship-bound Ipswich meaning they’ve not claimed a point at the Vitality Stadium in four games since that humping of Forest.
That game put them right in a race for Champions League football they appear to be limping out of despite the unconvincing and laughably inconsistent displays and results of everyone in this fastest snail contest.
Then again Bournemouth are a team that has lurched between relegation and top-four form at the flick of a switch across the last two seasons, so we would suggest there’s every chance Andoni Iraola finds the fuse box to put them back in the running if he wasn’t so clearly desperate for rumours of his summer move to Tottenham to be put to bed.
Ipswich, who had not won in the league since a 2-0 home victory over Chelsea on 30 December, had been the only team in the top four divisions in English football yet to claim a league win in 2025, and while there’s surely no chance of a Great Escape, Liam Delap further made his claim to remain in the top flight by smashing in his tenth Premier League goal of the season.
Manchester City 2-0 Leicester: Jack’s back
Jack Grealish scored his first Premier League goal since December 2023 in what incredibly was just his third start for Manchester City in the No.10 position, with his last opportunity to play in his favoured role the 3-2 FA Cup semi-final defeat to Liverpool in April 2022, in which he also scored.
Pep Guardiola doesn’t now just have an aversion to him playing there but to the player in general, which will surely lead to Grealish’s exit at the end of the season. And here’s hoping he moves to a club under a manager who values what he does in those pockets, gliding past challenges and bringing a mesmeric flow to a game of football that Guardiola sees as a luxury that his excessively-drilled team can’t or at least aren’t willing to endure.
A perhaps more significant moment for the remainder of this season and undoubtedly for seasons to come was the long-awaited return of Oscar Bobb, who came off the bench late on to make his first appearance of the campaign having recovered from his broken leg.
