Everton huge climbers in latest PL mood rankings, but not even Anfield housery can save Man United
We last did this two months ago, when Spurs were unbeaten, unbeatable and top of the league, Bournemouth were in terrible relegation bother and Everton hadn’t even had a load of points taken off them. A lot has changed. Not everything, though. Manchester United are still in crisis and Chelsea remain a wildly inconsistent shambles.
October’s rankings in brackets as we judge the mood around the Barclays just in time for the Busy Festive Period.
20. Manchester United (18)
Housing your way to a 0-0 at Anfield and it being the undoubted high point of the season is both something we can entirely get behind but also a fairly grim indication of where Manchester United are.
The crisis club tentacles have enveloped and consumed them. The results are bad, the Champions League failure unforgivably so, but worse still the football is very often borderline unwatchable. There are a few things about United’s record that catch the eye. The first is that the draw at Anfield was their first, and that a great many of their nine wins that sit alongside the seven losses have been ruinously unconvincing. The only game United have won this season where you’ve really felt like there was something approaching a complete performance and that a corner might actually have been turned was the 2-1 victory over Chelsea. And they got paddled 3-0 at home by Bournemouth three days later.
The grim reality of a United team that sits seventh in the table and six points outside the top four is that it’s far, far easier to imagine a world in which their performances yield worse results than it is to imagine them being any better. United, exemplified perfectly at Anfield, have eked as much as they possibly could from these first 17 games and even that has been really quite sh*t
But arguably the single most startling entry in any column on the entire league table is United’s 18 goals scored. That’s just f***ing miserable, lads. Luton and Forest have got 17 each. As have Palace, a team who have made relentless grey drudgery their calling card this season.
It is the most damning single piece of evidence for the current falseness of United’s still-crap position. Every one of the six teams above them has scored at least 17 goals more. Everyone outside the bottom six has scored at least three more.
United are in an unacceptably poor position, and all the evidence – both of the eyes and the harsh, uncaring numbers – is that really they’re lucky it isn’t worse. And the takeover still isn’t sorted. And Rasmus Hojlund still hasn’t scored a Premier League goal. In summary, then: bad.
19. Burnley (14)
When you make a concerted decision to move on from your beloved former manager and go in a totally different direction, it’s sub-optimal to find yourself marooned in the bottom three when that manager comes back with his new team and does exactly to you what you used to do to other teams together.
Burnley will never face the PFM wrath that was being stored up for Bournemouth, because they were canny enough to take this change of direction under a manager who had absolutely no experience but is someone the PFMs have heard of and respect and who Knows The League. But something needs to change. You can’t be going around being a team That Plays The Game A Certain Way while scoring fewer goals than dreary old Manchester United.
We’re putting them very low here, but that’s because while they’ve been no worse really than Luton or Sheffield United they were the team that wasn’t supposed to be like this.
18. Nottingham Forest (9)
Sleepwalking into real trouble. Nobody in the country is in worse form than a Forest side with a single point to their name from the last five games. In one of the season’s most damning statistics, Forest have actually managed to lose ground on Everton in that time, a time that has included Everton being docked 10 points.
We were very certain last season, even in Forest’s darker moments, that keeping Steve Cooper in charge represented both the best thing for the club and for him. We’re not anywhere near as convinced of that now. The constant churn of players is clearly something that is going to continue and this season there is just the start of a sense that the constant influx of new players has started to impact how much of a sh*t they actually give.
Cooper has done better than most could have in holding it all together over the last 18 months and turning this ever-changing rag-tag bunch into an actual football team. But Cooper is a fine and talented coach who would surely relish the chance to work with the same core group for a longer period of time. He’s been a key figure in the development of some of the Premier League’s most exciting young players, and it might be best for him to go somewhere where things are just less frenetic all the time. Essentially, over the last few weeks we’ve convinced ourselves that Steve Cooper being manager of Crystal Palace would be better for everyone: Cooper, Forest, Palace and above all Roy Hodgson.
Nuno Espirito Santo being manager of Nottingham Forest, not so much.
17. Crystal Palace (11)
It’s all well and good being one of Manchester City’s inexplicable bogey teams, but man cannot live on burgling points at the Etihad a surprisingly above average number of times alone. Palace have been moribund this season, under a manager who is a legend but also impossibly old and increasingly grumpy. He’s had a pop at the fans already, which rarely ends well for a manager of a team in 15th.
Palace in many ways find themselves in the worst position for the moods. It’s not really any fun, but so slender is the prospect of it actually getting bad enough for real relegation fears to set in thanks to the nature of that bottom three – with freefalling Nottingham Forest another canary down the mine for the Eagles – that you run the risk of just sort of existing, bobbing around in lower mid-table.
What makes this worse is that this has been Palace’s story for most of the last decade, and the manager has made it clear that he considers this a period of great success in the club’s history. He’s kind of right, but when you’ve finished somewhere between 10th and 15th on somewhere between 41 and 49 points every season for an entire decade, you would quite like to detect at least the desire to kick on from there rather than find yourself 15th and on course for 38 points while being told you’ve never had it so good.
16. Brentford (17)
Ah, it’s all just going a bit wrong, isn’t it? The resilience that made them so hard to play last season has just dissipated a bit and they’re now a rather forgettable team. Even after a run of four defeats in the last five they’re not in any real trouble, still 10 points clear of the wretched bottom three, but it’s no life is it? At no point in their first two seasons – from that opening-night win over Arsenal onwards – have Brentford been the most forgettable team in the Premier League but that is where we now find ourselves. Neither good nor bad enough to really catch the eye, Brentford are currently a team summed up entirely by a goals for and goals against column that both read 24. A level goal difference isn’t in itself a sign of mundanity because it can be done by a team that is entertainingly daft at both ends of the pitch – West Ham, for instance, currently have a goal difference of -1 – but when you have a level goal difference and an entirely unremarkable number of goals in those columns, you’re heading toward the humdrum.
Plus, if you’re a Brentford fan you’re currently counting down the days until your elite 20-goal-a-season striker can return to action while reading every day about which Big Bastard should simply sign him from you at the very instant that happens. Which is very annoying.
15. Chelsea (16)
Terrible. They’re not a good team, they may very well have appointed an unsuitable manager, there may very well be no suitable manager at all under the current regime and, worst of all, there is no prospect of any of this changing while Chelsea remain capable of pulling the occasional result from the depths of their anus and – more importantly – Crisis Club focus remains elsewhere. The reasons why Manchester United continue to attract the bulk of attention in this regard are many, varied and for the most part valid, but a Big Six club not in Europe spending unprecedented sums of money to be very slightly better than Fulham should be attracting more attention than this.
Generally, ‘under the radar’ is a good place to be. For Chelsea at the moment, it’s allowing all manner of unacceptable things to slide. Their gift/curse right now is to have results that are just about good enough to avoid talk of catastrophe, yet without them ever really being good enough to look like a corner has been turned or suggest progress towards a long-term goal. Beat Spurs and draw at City in a pair of daftnesses? Best lose at home to Brentford next, then. Beat Brighton? Marvellous. Now lose at the worst Manchester United team in Premier League history, please. And then get thoroughly outclassed by Everton.
What Chelsea do have now is the gentlest Busy Festive Period of anyone. Wolves, Palace, Luton, Fulham is a run of Barclays games over the next three weeks that absolutely anyone would take. It should be fascinating to see how Chelsea go about making no tangible overall improvement across that run.
14. Sheffield United (19)
It’s going to be a bit better under Chris Wilder, and the good news for the Blades is that two other teams have been basically as bad as they have. The bad news is that they really need that number to be three to make things interesting. Forest are giving it a go, but it’s a lot to ask.
What marks Sheffield United out against the other teams down in the dumps is that Sheffield United are comfortably the most likely to get absolutely pumped by five or six (or eight) and also that this could happen to them at any time against any opposition rather than just someone good. Not fun.
13. Luton (13)
Already done enough to put those Derby County comparisons to bed and developed a fine habit for giving big teams the absolute shits at Kenilworth Road even if the results haven’t quite been there at the end of it all. Will probably still get relegated but that isn’t going to shock anyone at Luton. What they are not going to be is humiliated, and there’s plenty of reasons to expect results in the second half of the season to outstrip those from the first – not least because their home schedule is inevitably far easier in the second half of the season having ticked off four of the top five and given every single one of them a proper game.
This is meant to be a light and fun and frankly piss-takey type of a feature, but there’s no way of avoiding the harrowing Tom Lockyer situation. Nothing quite kicks the mood in the guts like the horrifying intrusion of real life into this daft bullshit. Feeling a bit down in the dumps because you’ve managed to convince yourself VAR is an elaborate ruse designed to specifically punish your football club because reasons seems a bit inconsequential against watching your club captain have a cardiac arrest on the pitch.
12. Wolves (10)
Tipped by many (that is, us) for relegation and in absolutely no danger of that happening, so that’s good.
The 3-0 defeat at West Ham was pretty horrid – not least because it was largely self-inflicted – but also an aberration. Wolves’ last 11 Premier League games have produced four wins, three draws and four defeats, which is a pretty decent guide of where they are. But also that West Ham game was the first in that run settled, for good or bad, by more than a single goal.
Wolves are fine, the mood is fine. The end.
11. Fulham (12)
It might not seem like a big jump, but it takes an awful lot for us to move Fulham out of 12th. It wasn’t far off being a Phil Neville England ladder kind of banter, really. There’s a danger of this dizzy 11th place being a false high – especially after the nature of that defeat at Newcastle and Raul Jimenez deciding to tackle Sean Longstaff’s face with his anus – but at the same time one cannot simply rush past a team that struggled for goals even when it had Aleksandar Mitrovic doing, well, pretty much what Raul Jimenez is currently doing actually, suddenly just reeling off back-to-back 5-0 wins in the space of four days for a laugh.
If you’re going to be a mid-table team in danger of neither relegation nor a European tilt – and there’s no shame in that, but it can be dull – then it is entirely necessary to do something to make it fun. Otherwise you end up being Crystal Palace.
Back-to-back 5-0 wins followed by your newly in-form striker getting himself a ban for tackling people in the face with his anus and crashing to a 3-0 defeat is many things but you could never call it dull.
10. Manchester City (5)
Pep, are you f***ing this up? There is growing evidence for our theory that Guardiola is these days setting out to make life more difficult for himself just to feel something. Giving soft boys Arsenal a couple of battle-hardened title winners was the first big clue. Cheerfully allowing the squad to be weakened in the summer another. Admittedly, Guardiola probably wasn’t counting on a long-term Kevin De Bruyne injury when allowing the big-game cojones of Ilkay Gundogan and Riyad Mahrez to walk out the door, but also a long-term Kevin De Bruyne injury isn’t that surprising an occurrence.
A team that sits only one point above Tottenham are still seen as the favourites for the title by many, on the basis that Manchester City will simply go and win 14 games in a row when they need to because winning 14 games in a row when they need to is simply what Manchester City do.
Now, that’s true. And it’s also true that City rarely reach their final form in the autumn even in seasons when they don’t have the squad upheaval we saw this year. But they also look a million miles from a team that’s going to go and win 14 games in a row. The carelessness, the sloppiness that has seen them drop points from winning positions in four of their last six games has to be a worry, while the jaunt to the World Club Championship will likely leave them with a lot of catching up to do by the time they next take the field in an unpleasantly awkward-looking trip to Everton.
An unpleasantly awkward-looking trip that will no doubt be game one of a run of 14 straight wins.
9. Newcastle (4)
It’s just not quite panning out to be the season Newcastle hoped for, is it? It was understandable – admirable, even – for Newcastle to want to resist wild summer spending to completely revolutionise the squad. It was good to see them return to the Champions League largely with the players that got them there.
But it may also have been foolish. There are mitigations in the injury list and the way they got played on the Sandro Tonali farce (although Newcastle must take some of the blame for their own failure to see what was happening there) but the truth is that Newcastle really didn’t give themselves a chance. They have more money than god and went into this season with a squad that just wasn’t equipped for competing on multiple fronts. They battled gamely in a teak-tough Champions League group, but the fact it’s probably a blessing that they ended it fourth and out of Europe altogether rather than third is pretty damning really. Newcastle still seem to be approaching life as plucky, popular underdogs. That’s not you any more, lads. Be who you are.
Eddie Howe may be right when he says the overall project remains ahead of schedule, but there’s no denying this season has seen Newcastle take a couple of significant steps back.
It’s not been bad. They’re still sixth, they’re still in Champions League contention (although thanks in some part to their own struggles it does look like it will now have to be top four rather than top five). But it really should have been better than this.
8. Bournemouth (20)
We should all be feeling good about Bournemouth, because for a vexingly long time there it seemed they were well on the way to being a ‘careful what you wish for’ cautionary tale that the PFMs would pretend to be sad about while being secretly delighted that replacing solid, dependable and tremendously English Gary O’Neil with a random foreign had spectacularly failed. The four-match losing run with which O’Neil ended last season had already been wiped from the memories and it had become accepted canon that O’Neil, had he been allowed to continue his good works, would undoubtedly and inevitably have led Bournemouth onwards and upwards.
It meant Andoni Iraola was on to a loser initially when the club took an undeniably ruthless decision to go for a manager with more experience for a long-term project. Start well, and O’Neil would get the credit; start badly and it would all be on Iraola. And Bournemouth started epically, historically badly. The only thing that went their way was others starting even more epically and historically badly.
Now, though, all is looking well. Since a 6-1 defeat at Manchester City in the far off days of last month when City were still good, Bournemouth are unbeaten. They’ve won four – including a 3-0 pantsing at Old Trafford – with the only blemish a 2-2 draw against title-bothering Villa.
They are 10 points clear of the bottom three and near enough out of danger, and Bournemouth taking a bold but exciting punt with Iraola didn’t mean thinking O’Neil had nothing to offer. He is proving himself a Premier League-worthy gaffer at Wolves, Bournemouth are now flourishing without him. Win-win. Which is good for the mood.
7. Brighton (8)
The entertainers’ streak of scoring in consecutive games ends at 32 with defeat at Arsenal, funnily enough on the very ground where they last kept a clean sheet of their own 21 matches ago. Both those numbers, of course, highlight precisely why Everyone Loves Brighton Apart From Crystal Palace Fans. But what should slightly trouble you as a Brighton fan right now is that everyone is getting more fond of you now, because you’re no longer actually perceived as a threat. Brighton have now become exactly what the Big Fish want. A club to be patted on the head and commended for the entertaining nature of their football as they sit ninth in the table not actually bothering them. Which was actually a bit ghastly, thank you very much. Roberto De Zerbi’s team are just as entertaining to watch as last season, but no longer quite as effective. Great for everyone else, minor pisser for them. The overall mood is, though, overwhelmingly positive, not least because of the startling good fun they’ve had in Europe, making it through their maiden group stage campaign in the Europa with some truly memorable nights – especially against Ajax home and away. There can be some grumbles about some daftness domestically, but those European nights show Brighton are still very much living the dream.
6. West Ham (7)
Are having some absolutely terrible days, where they go and do something like lose 5-0 at Fulham. And some absolutely brilliant ones, where they go and pull Tottenham’s pants down or give Wolves a shoeing. There have definitely been more of the latter than the former, which is good, and the Hammers have once again coped impressively with the demands being placed upon them by all the fixtures from being in all the competitions. Won their Europa League group with five wins out of six and are still in the Carabao as well while sitting very handily on the fringe of the European places in the league.
It’s all very acceptable, really.
5. Liverpool (3)
Good enough to make winning the title a tantalisingly real prospect, not quite good enough we suspect to actually do it. The frustration at having an enforced transitional year at the same time Manchester City decide to have an unenforced one just to feel alive is annoying.
The Man United game was just awful and provided a blueprint that showed how even a big bunch of mid-table wastrels who are trying to get the manager sacked can shut down a side that might just have become too heavily reliant on Mo Salah these days.
That all being said, let’s not pretend these are dark days for Liverpool. That midfield is a work in progress, but the new elements of it are all quite promising ones. Salah remains one of the division’s most beguiling and watchable stars, while Trent Alexander-Arnold continues to grow as a player who cannot be defined by something as mundane or prosaic as a position. They are also, by our favoured metric, the most fun team to watch in the entire league given their heroic fondness for going behind – often while playing conspicuously badly – only to roar back and win games in thrilling style.
This is also another reason why United’s Anfield tactic of not even trying to take the lead was so inspired.
4. Tottenham (1)
Understandable, but slightly lost their minds during that five-match run of shedding all of their wheels and attempting to torpedo their own season and complete Spursiness. There has been a marked uptick in Arsenal and Liverpool style conspiracy theorising from Spurs fans about recent decisions, and that’s a shame. Not least because the story of Spurs’ red cards in recent weeks is really ‘How has it not been more red cards?’
What’s good, though, is that faith was never lost even as their run of losing games after going 1-0 up became ever more absurd, and they’ve now hit upon the successful policy of going 2-0 up instead in back-to-back wins over Newcastle and Forest. It’s a good strategy and one we hope they stick with.
With the exception of the Conte-lite effort at Wolves, Spurs’ football throughout their losing run remained thrillingly – often recklessly – entertaining and that is key. The late collapse at Wolves seemed to at least reinforce the certainty that this wasn’t how they were going to go about things any more and if that meant trying to play with four centre-backs and a one-man Giovani Lo Celso midfield then that’s what Spurs were going to do. Mate.
Spurs fans could do without the joke being so relentlessly and consistently on them, but the overall picture is far rosier now than could ever have been predicted for anyone watching Spurs play last season and learning that Harry Kane would leave.
There is an entirely plausible universe in which Cristian Romero doesn’t try to remove Enzo Fernandez’s leg at the knee, and it’s fun/torturous to think of that universe. In that universe, neither Micky van de Ven nor James Maddison get injured, we never see Spurs play with four full-backs and no centre-backs and they are very likely five points clear at the top. Does that improve or worsen the mood? This is Spurs. The joke is always on them. It’s the latter.
3. Everton (15)
Tremendous. Fuelled by righteous anger and with Dycheball having taken a full and effective hold, Everton are back. The 10-point penalty is already an irrelevance in terms of the relegation battle – if not the European battle – but its existence remains fertile, powerful fuel for a fanbase having just about the best time its possible for a fanbase to have: a team they can be proud of, and a sense of injustice to propel it. If you don’t believe me about the second part, just look at the absurd lengths Arsenal, Liverpool and more recently Tottenham fans will go to in a bid to confect some kind of ‘us against the world’ mentality because a borderline decision went against them.
The Toffees have it pretty good right now. They’ve even started scoring some goals, which is a welcome and unexpected twist.
Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re just off to have a little think about what Twitter would look like if Arsenal or Liverpool got a 10-point penalty.
2. Arsenal (2)
It is, on the face of it, all going absolutely perfectly for Arsenal. They are currently the best team in the country by quite a distance, and should at this stage win the league spinning on their cocks. That they are only one point ahead is, of course, down to The Conspiracy. And that is also perfect. Arsenal have been brilliant this season, but there’s been just enough going on if you really squint and are determined to convince yourself you are the victims. Plucky little Arsenal’s £100m midfield man Declan Rice has proved to be every bit as good as hoped/expected, but now even the Kai Havertz deal is starting to look like it might have been value. And that’s essentially witchcraft. Sauntered into the last 16 on their return to the Champions League, and got a favourable draw in that as well.
Yes, it’s all going absolutely brilliantly. But therein lies the problem. The mood is, clearly, very good indeed but football fans are only human, and football fandom does not sit easily alongside rationality. There is within all Arsenal fans now both the knowledge that there really is no excuse for not winning the league this time. A regenerated Liverpool aren’t quite ready, Aston Villa are astonishingly even in the conversation, Spurs are Spurs, Newcastle are knackered, pretty much everyone else is crap and – by far most importantly – even Manchester City are for some reason utter bobbins. The idea that City are just going to at some point win 14 games in a row because that’s what they do appears to ignore an awful lot of more recent evidence. Arsenal thus have only two possible outcomes: win the league, or bottle the league. It’s wonderfully exciting, but also terrifying.
1. Aston Villa (6)
Haha, what on earth are they playing at? Ridiculous behaviour all round from Villa, who right now really do appear to be the second best football team in the land having beaten Manchester City and Arsenal back-to-back and then showed their feistier, combative side to come back and sort out Brentford. They find themselves slap bang in the middle of a title race and do not, unlike certain other teams who have at times found themselves in such a position this season, appear to play a brand of football likely at some point to go catastrophically awry for a bit. With the flaws evident in all around them, Villa should absolutely be able to keep themselves in there.
Couple of things that make this even better. First, that they lost their first game of the season 5-1 to a team now nine points behind them. Second, that Villa fans are in the envious position of being able to simply enjoy it all because there is no expectation upon them. They are not quite, for many reasons, Leicester City at this point in 2015. They are a far bigger club coming from a stronger starting position. But the similarities are there. It is wholly unexpected to see them up there, yet suddenly with some retrofitting hindsight quite reasonable when you consider the evidence from the previous season in which relegation fears were eased by a run of form that, sustained over a season, would absolutely put you there or thereabouts.
The difference is that Villa’s run of such form started earlier and was sustained for longer. But the relegation fears were there. On November 1 last year, Villa sat outside the bottom three by a single point and were sandwiched, level on points, between two teams – Southampton and Leeds – who would eventually go. It’s a startling turnaround. And, like Leicester, they’ve done it with a manager who was ridiculed and mocked when he ‘failed’ at one of those snooty Big Six clubs.