Premier League winners and losers: Liverpool (and Newcastle, and Villa, and Spurs) enjoy
Not many Premier League weekends that go absolutely perfectly for as many clubs as this one did. We’re pretty sure that Liverpool, Newcastle, Villa, Spurs and Wolves wouldn’t change a single thing about it.
Winners
Liverpool
The crisis – and let’s be honest it was a crisis largely contained within the Mailbox and The Sun, which nobody in Liverpool reads anyway – of Thursday and Friday gave way to a weekend of almost ludicrous dream-like perfection.
We’re not entirely sure why it has become necessary to observe that you don’t usually actually need to win every single game from February onwards to win the league, but we’re cheerfully going to go ahead and blame it first on social media and second on Manchester City spending several years tricking us all.
Look, we all had our fun after the 2-2 draw with Villa, but the idea that a draw away from home at a team in the last 16 of the Champions League meant the sky was falling in was always a bit much. We’re giving a bit more leeway to the aftermath of the Everton game, because the nature of that absolutely propelled it into ‘feels like a defeat’ territory and the instant headloss from the actual players and coaches rather than mere social-media dafties did feel significant.
But even that, really, was no catastrophe given Everton’s current form. It was just a bad time to play them and ended thusly.
Liverpool are not a perfect team. It would be weird if they were, given that they have a new manager introducing a new style of play to a squad that had got very used to the previous manager’s own successful ways.
But again, the idea that only a perfect team can win the league is another Pep Guardiola mind-trick we would all do well to forget. Sir Alex Ferguson definitely didn’t only win the league with perfect teams.
Flawed teams win the league all the time. And Liverpool are, this season, comfortably the least flawed team around. Doesn’t sound like a compliment, but is actually the biggest one a team can be given.
We’ll never now know for sure, of course, whether Liverpool would have been so decisively and slickly impressive in dismantling Man City had Arsenal managed to apply some scoreboard pressure on Saturday, but the way Liverpool went about their work at the Etihad does make us suspect that yes, yes they would.
The doom and gloom after Villa was always over the top, but there was a nugget of truth in there. Liverpool had shown glimpses of vulnerability, and had done so ahead of a weekend that did undeniably have the look of one that could conceivably reshape the look of the title race.
Arsenal beating West Ham at home and Liverpool losing at City was not an idle thought, and had that come to pass we’d be looking at Arsenal just five points behind with a game in hand. That thoroughly game-on scenario looked all too feasible at the back end of last week.
So for Liverpool to emerge from a weekend where they would absolutely have settled for maintaining the status quo having instead shifted the needle three points in their favour is massive.
The bad news now, though, is that if they don’t win it there will be absolutely no way to avoid the bottle-job claims. Sorry, we don’t make the rules.
Mo Salah
Another absurd chapter in an absurd season. We can all laugh at the made-up ‘records’ he’s supposedly breaking – as ever, we subscribe to the tried-and-tested Mediawatch rule that if you can’t tell us whose record has been broken then it isn’t a record – but the numbers are utterly compelling without any lily-gilding being necessary.
His pursuit of the Golden Boot looks almost as secure as Liverpool’s of the title, with his nearest challengers now six adrift. And nobody with a double-figure goal tally is even within 10 of his ludicrous 16 assists.
His nearest challengers of any kind in that race are also six adrift and the idea of him winning both individual races and the team’s by double-figure margins cannot now be discounted if he remains injury-free. It is one of the all-time great dominant Premier League seasons.
Newcastle
A rather more chaotic victory than was ideal or appeared necessary when scooting into a 4-1 lead with 10 minutes left of the first half, but a much-needed win nevertheless after a costly pair of defeats against Fulham and Man City in the increasingly congested Champions League tussle.
It was perhaps not Liverpool-level excellent overall, but still an enormously satisfactory weekend. Newcastle obviously inflicted their own damage on a direct rival in Nottingham Forest, but doing that on a weekend when Arsenal, Manchester City, Bournemouth and Chelsea all also lost has shifted things significantly.
Yes, it’s great that Forest and Bournemouth results are so significant here, and yes, we did also just relegate Arsenal from the title race to the top-four race. Fight us.
We don’t really mean it. Even in their current bottleless, strikerless state, Arsenal will still finish second if only because the teams in pursuit are so entertainingly flawed in their various ways.
But that means it’s going to be great fun for the rest of us watching this battle pan out. Newcastle now sit fifth, in what will almost certainly be the final Champions League place. Forest in third are only three points ahead, Villa in eighth only two points behind. Brighton and even Fulham – four and five behind respectively – can’t be entirely discounted just yet either.
It’s just as well the European scrap looks like being an all-timer, because it doesn’t now look like we’re going to get much of a title or relegation fight.
Alexander Isak
Nobody’s catching Salah, but two more goals for Isak reiterate his best-of-the-rest credentials and his current right to be considered the Premier League’s pre-eminent centre-forward with no need even for any Erling Haaland caveat.
Aston Villa
Still only eighth, but the only teams above them to win this weekend were Liverpool (irrelevant and beat one of Villa’s direct rivals) and Newcastle (relevant but beat another of Villa’s direct rivals).
Defeats for the teams currently sitting second, third, four, sixth, and seventh makes for an unusual Barclays weekend and it never hurts to be the among the odd ones out on such occasions.
To reiterate: that race for the European spots is going to be an absolute corker.
Marcus Rashford and Marco Asensio
We’ve read back what we wrote about Villa’s win over Chelsea and it barely makes sense, which we’re putting down to the sheer otherworldly oddness that comes with trying to process a universe in which Aston Villa’s matchwinners are Marcus Rashford and Marco Asensio.
In the best possible way, it just doesn’t feel right, does it? Only time will tell whether Villa’s PSR-baiting gamble actually pays off, but it’s hard not to admire a club seeing an opportunity that may never come around again and just throwing absolutely everything at it.
The next few months really could be very special for Villa, and they are now approaching this crucial period with not just more talent but far more experience and nous about what’s required than could ever have been dreamed possible even at the start of this season. Worrying about what happens next if it all goes wrong can come later.
Tottenham
Let us all stop and give rightful praise to the Premier League’s form team. Stop laughing at the back.
Nobody can currently match their three-game winning run, and while 4-1 certainly flattered them at Ipswich there were many reasons to be legitimately impressed and to wonder at what the rest of the season might now hold for Spurs.
It has, obviously, been terrible up to this point. But Ange Postecoglou and his injury-battered team of dafties might just have cultivated a scenario that at almost any other club you’d think might just be ideal.
That recent run of league form in and around their cup exits has streamlined their season quite wonderfully. There is now no excuse to do anything other than focus everything on a very, very winnable Europa League where no truly terrifying opponent lurks and somehow even the other English side involved is somehow even worse and more stupid than Spurs are.
This was a result that means Spurs can absolutely now forget all about relegation; the bottom three are too bad and now too far adrift.
Yet they still have no chance of salvaging the league season in any meaningfully acceptable way. With a big finish and following wind, they might just about feasibly catch Fulham – six points away in 10th and always prone to a 40-point tools-downing.
But so what? It’s still almost impossible for Spurs to have anything other than their worst league season since 2008, when they finished 11th.
You know what else they did in 2008? Yeah, that’s right. Won a trophy. They’ve not bothered with that kind of tacky showiness since. But they really do have an enormous chance now.
This is a perfect storm. It won’t be repeated. A situation where Spurs are absolutely free to completely prioritise a tournament they have a compelling, realistic chance of winning, and a situation where even to Daniel Levy’s joylessly spreadsheet-driven mind it is the right thing to do, given the Champions League prize on offer for the Europa League winners.
The upcoming defeat to AZ Alkmaar is really, really going to sting.
Brennan Johnson
We’re huge fans of stats here but working them out can be a long and boring affair that requires boffins and nerds and clipboards and in the most extreme cases supercomputers.
Sometimes it’s best to just say tits to all that and just make up stats that sound right and feel right. Does it matter if it’s actually true if it feels true deep in your bones? Of course not.
And in that spirit, we are happy to declare that not since Raheem Sterling in his 2018/19 pomp at City has a player scored nine or more Premier League goals with a lower yards-per-goal figure than Brennan Johnson, who is becoming the tap-in merchant’s tap-in merchant.
A lot of people remain sniffy about this type of goalscoring, and there is still something vaguely unconvincing about Johnson as a footballer. But in an injury-hit season he has shown a compelling ability in this very specific and very valuable area.
And if tap-ins were that easy, everyone would be doing them, wouldn’t they?
Wolves
A win at Bournemouth is in itself a far bigger deal than has ever previously been the case, but for Wolves any win this weekend would have been significant because of just how it has reshaped the bottom of the Premier League table.
Slowly but surely more and more teams have extricated themselves from an increasingly distilled relegation fight. Some have done it with a stirring run of their own form, a la Everton and even West Ham to an extent.
Others, like Man United and Tottenham have got away with awful seasons because enough teams below them just haven’t bothered winning any points at all for extended periods of time.
Yet one team other than the promoted (and soon to be relegated) trio that had somehow contrived – until now – to avoid escape velocity had been Wolves. They have for some time now looked like an incongruous, outlying member of that bottom four. They have long appeared the one remaining team in the true relegation fight capable of the sort of run that would lift them out of that unpleasantness.
All the indications are that this time is now. Two wins from the last three games, as well as the entirely admirable-in-defeat effort at Anfield, have shown what we have long suspected: Wolves are not as bad as Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich.
Not huge news, but does feel like having the table finally starting to match perception is good news. For Wolves, if not those of us who like a good ol’ relegation scrap.
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Losers
Arsenal
Almost heroically Peak Arsenal. They have surely never been more them than this.
Yes, talk of Liverpool’s demise was hilariously and ludicrously overblown – mainly by fans of Liverpool themselves, naturally – but that doesn’t mean this weekend didn’t still represent a huge and possibly final chance to really get the title-race nerves jangling over at Anfield.
Liverpool’s draw at Villa, on the back of another draw at Everton and unconvincing home win over Wolves, had given everyone pause. And this weekend’s fixtures could hardly have been more helpful. Arsenal with first-mover advantage at home to a listing West Ham, wobbling Liverpool facing a Super Sunday at a Manchester City side with seemingly nothing left to lose and so many points to prove.
We’re kicking ourselves, frankly, for not seeing Arsenal’s meek and mild 1-0 defeat to the Hammers coming. This wasn’t even like last season’s smash-and-grab raid at the Emirates from David Moyes’ West Ham.
It’s absolutely vital that Myles Lewis-Skelly’s extremely memeable and narrative-heavy red card not distract from one important fact: Arsenal were really quite rubbish, and deservedly behind, even with 11 men.
The absence of a striker worthy of the name is a known and largely irrelevant caveat now. It was Arsenal’s own choice not to try and do anything about a clearly foreseeable set of circumstances in January. And the absence of an experienced attacking figurehead could not in any case entirely explain the near total lack of creative craft or even ambition Arsenal displayed on such a big occasion against a demonstrably, provably vulnerable opponent.
Is it fair for everyone else to point and laugh yet again at the only team that gave us a title race in the last two seasons or the semblance of one this time? Not really, but that is going to be forever the fate of this team unless and until they shut out the noise from inside and out themselves by actually getting something done.
The Champions League still presents an opportunity, but does anyone out there really now expect them to take it?
Mikel Merino
Turns out he might not in fact be the number nine of Arsenal’s dreams, and might not in fact be a player who can save them £150m and that other even quite bad teams might not in fact be as bad as Leicester. Fair play, though, he had us all fooled.
Myles Lewis-Skelly
We really want to ignore all the noise here but there’s no real escaping the fact Lewis-Skelly’s breakthrough season has been a spectacularly loud one. And would probably have been so even at a club without the amplifying effect of Arsenal. Collecting his first Premier League booking before his first Premier League appearance, a rescinded red card, the humbling of Erling Haaland and now a second red card. Which will not be rescinded.
And amongst it all, more boringly but perhaps importantly, confirming himself to be a player of rare talent and potential.
But we must all try to at least strip that away enough to point out just how thick what he did on Saturday was. Sure, Arsenal weren’t playing well, but the situation was entirely salvageable until Lewis-Skelly lost the plot.
Through his own actions and the noise around him, he has put himself under a harsh spotlight for a player so callow. Interesting now to see how he bounces back from a setback so self-inflicted that not even the most conspiracy-addled Arsenal fans can muster much defence.
Manchester City
We’re all so hardwired to expect it that every time Manchester City’s muscle memory kicks in briefly and they look anything like their old selves we start to wonder if this is the start of it, if this is where the recovery begins.
There have even been times when we’ve thought it was actually happening, despite ourselves.
But it is not and will not. City will continue turning corners and finding only dead ends and cul-de-sacs for the rest of this season, with what happens after that little more than a great big flashing neon question mark that isn’t even only there because they look so confusingly unkempt on the field.
They can still produce individual games when they look like Manchester City. But, lads, Tottenham can do that. What City cannot do any more is control and dictate games and do so for months on end until reaching at last a successful conclusion long since foregone.
They will probably still stumble into a Champions League place when it all comes to an end, but we’re not even entirely sure about that ‘probably’. And the fact so much doubt exists in a season when two of the Big Six have been historically dreadful and Chelsea are showing big signs of reverting to recent clusterf*ck type is a damning indictment on a team that produced a run of title-winning the like of which English football has never seen before.
We honestly don’t know where they go from here, and are increasingly unsure about who should even be the man to lead them on that journey. Does Pep Guardiola really have the energy and belief and desire for it? He looks far more tired – in every way – than Jurgen Klopp did at Liverpool.
Kevin De Bruyne
We are out of our element with no frame of reference here, but we imagine it must be crushingly hard for any footballer of anything like De Bruyne’s quality to reach the point where you have to start acknowledging your own decline. Where the thing that has defined your life, the thing you have been better at than almost any other human on earth, no longer comes as easily as it once did.
We are certain there is absolutely no easy way to finally face that stark, horrible truth. But we imagine having to do so while someone else who should be in the exact same boat is instead even better than they have ever been before must be about the toughest.
Manchester United
A point they didn’t deserve and the near certainty that they won’t have to truly demean themselves in an actual real relegation fight cannot spare United from a place in the losers, because they remain an unholy rabble of a mess of a football club, one seemingly rotting from every end in every direction.
‘They won’t actually get relegated’ is about the hollowest of victories of which it is possible to conceive when This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About.
The simple fact that a current look at the league table and state of play around the various clubs around Manchester United leads inevitably to a conclusion that their likeliest current finishing position is 16th should not and cannot be normalised.
Chelsea
Nine points from 10 games have turned an unexpected title challenge into an unexpected scramble for a European spot – any European spot.
On December 21, barely two months ago, Chelsea sat second in the league. They were just two points behind Liverpool. They were one ahead of Arsenal with a game in hand.
Since that date, they’ve amassed fewer points than Tottenham. They’ve only managed one more than Manchester United. In a Premier League table from December 22 to today, Chelsea would sit 16th.
And it’s still zero Premier League points since getting knocked out of the FA Cup gave them just the chance they needed to focus on the Barclays.
If that remains the case after tomorrow night’s home game with Southampton, then we might even start to consider the most shocking of all possibilities: Chelsea not cruising to unconvincingly season-salvaging victory in the Conference League.
Filip Jorgensen
Oh, mate.
Nottingham Forest
Look, we’re not having a go given where they remain in the grand scheme, but that is now three defeats in the last four Premier League games for a Forest side whose next two league games are against Arsenal and Man City.
Bonus points, though, for having a run of three defeats in four games that includes a 5-0 drubbing yet emerging from that wreckage with a level goal difference.
The Relegation Fight
We fear for it, we really do. Wolves now look well capable of bridging the gap from relegation battlers to lower-mid-table stragglers, and in doing so would leave the three promoted clubs adrift, forlorn and lost at the bottom.
The gap is already five points, with Wolves’ goal difference – 12 better than any of the bottom three – effectively worth another.
Ipswich’s last five points have taken them 10 games to acquire, while in Leicester’s case it’s 13 games for their last seven. And neither of them now has any more chance to rack up points against a Spurs side who have kindly provided 28.5 per cent of their combined win tally this season.
And they don’t even play each other – and thus guarantee at least something for at least one of them – until the penultimate weekend of the season when it will surely already be too late to matter.
Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich lost this weekend by an aggregate score of 12-1 and none of them played a team higher than ninth.
With numbers like that it’s not even entirely outside the realm of fantasy that, with 22 points, Wolves already have enough. Even their overall current PPG would only lift Ipswich and Leicester to 25, and that’s starting to have about it the look of a stretch target.
The Title Fight
In a way, Arsenal are really less to blame here than anyone else. And if you think about it, in a way, Liverpool are also the most to blame.
We’re not interested in the blame game. We’re sat here sadly shaking our heads at everyone for denying us an exciting title fight, as is our God-given right as Englishmen.