Arsenal go again, Liverpool’s midfield, Spurs’ defence: Top 10 pleasant surprises of the season so far
The emphasis here is on ‘pleasant’. Not everyone is going to be pleased about all these things, obviously, because football fandom is not about being pleased for others, is it? We mean pleasant here generally as in better than expected. We’re not asking Liverpool fans to be chuffed about how good Spurs’ new defence is looking. We’re not idiots. Well, we are. But not complete idiots.
There’s one obvious exception in here to the ‘pleasant’ criterion, but that’s because it makes the whole league more fun and we hope it’s taken in the spirit it’s intended. If we know football fans, we should be fine. Ahem.
10) Alfie Doughty
Now officially England’s best non-broken left-back after Luton’s switch to a back four against Tottenham. Get him on the plane, Gareth.
9) Nottingham Forest not looking at all relegationy
They’ve a funny old set-up at Forest where they seemingly feel obliged to buy a whole new team’s worth of players every transfer window. That made perfect sense last summer when they really did actually need a whole new squad, but it does feel like that should be a one-off deal rather than permanent strategy.
Present and reliably calm and composed among all the chaos, though, is Steve Cooper who really does appear to be that happiest and rarest of occurrences: a manager in just the right job at just the right time at a club that realises and appreciates this fact.
There will almost certainly be a point somewhere in the season where relegation’s icy grasp threatens to ensnare them, but it’s hard to envision a scenario now in which they actually go down. They are the epitome of “They’ll be fine”. We didn’t expect that at all after their vaguely rogue promotion in 2022.
8) Anthony Gordon
Were absolutely convinced Newcastle had done their money in January. Still thought he was a bit rubbish when this season was quite significantly under way. Now realising we were quite wrong on this. Not every team he’ll come up against is going to be Sheffield United-level accommodating, but he was absurd that day and it was no one-off.
Has suddenly catapulted himself into the England picture which, given the options available to England in wide attacking positions, is really quite something.
7) Brighton leaning even harder into Brightoning
Fully expected Brighton to once again be really good, never dreamed they’d lean even harder into the whole thing by becoming the most wildly entertaining team in the whole league by a wide margin. If you’d asked us to name the teams whose goals would (in a largely positive way, i.e. not through repeated hammerings) feature the most goals we’d have confidently put forward Tottenham and Liverpool.
And they’re both doing fine; 27 goals in Liverpool’s eight games, 26 in Tottenham’s. Both well above three a game. They’re certainly not dull. Brighton’s games have featured 37 goals. Superb nonsense. Nobody has scored more goals, only the bottom three (who have a single win between them) have conceded more. At current speed and course, they will score close to 100 goals and concede 76. Long way to go, but we can all surely agree those are outcomes we could all enjoy.
6) Raheem Sterling
Still appears to be drifting out of the England picture, which is a shame, but fears that his career was on a general downward curve that grew and grew as he became swallowed up by Chelsea’s miserable nonsense last season have proved unfounded. Even when Chelsea’s results weren’t yet matching up to the underlying numbers, Sterling was still delivering. Now they’re even winning some games, and Sterling is still proving absolutely key to it all.
Still absolutely baffling that the one person who doesn’t appear to be impressed or pleased about this is Gareth Southgate, a man whose near blind loyalty to his favourites is the stuff of legend.
5) Wolves being vaguely competent
We feared for them, we really did, and there’s still plenty of time for it to go horribly wrong given the fragility of a squad that will never score loads of goals and relies massively on not conceding any. No great surprise that well over 60% of game time in Wolves’ matches this season has been spent with the scoreline all square, some surprise that the outcome of that is an okay eight points from eight games rather than a whole bunch of agonising 1-0 defeats.
It’s like the world’s dullest tightrope act, in a way, but beating Manchester City was gloriously unexpected but a more general grinding competence may well be enough to stay up with something to spare in this particular Premier League.
Most surprising of all, though, is the fact Wolves are scoring more than a goal a game. Absolutely definitely did not see that coming. Hee-chan Hwang and Pedro Neto are essentially wizards.
READ: Premier League’s best finishers 23/24: Channy now leads top 10 with Haaland 86th
4) Manchester City looking mortal
Right, this isn’t supposed to be a mean piece. This isn’t a place for chuckling it up at anyone’s struggles. This is supposed to be about things that are good and nice and pleasant. Frankly, we’re wildly out of our comfort zone, but never mind.
So hopefully City fans can take this one in the spirit it’s intended because it’s a massive compliment really. Essentially we were worried that this season might be rubbish because City were so obviously going to win the league again and there’s nothing wrong with that but things are better when there’s some jeopardy or peril.
A fortnight ago we had no idea who would finish second but were absolutely certain City would win the title. We no longer have that certainty and while this reflects no specific ill will against Pep Guardiola’s brilliant band of trophy-snaffling bastards, it’s all a lot more fun if you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next.
City were properly crap at Arsenal. They remain by far the likeliest winners but no longer certain ones. And whichever club you’re talking about in whichever league, that’s always better. City are the only club capable of running away with this league, so if they’re not doing that it’s good news for everyone else in a way the more obvious yet mean-spirited amusement at the struggles of your Man Uniteds or Chelseas isn’t. Anyway, enjoy looking back at this one in April when City are 12 points clear and have just won 6-0 for the seventh weekend in a row.
3) Liverpool’s midfield
We weren’t at all sure what to make of Liverpool for long periods of last season, at one point even starting to wonder if Jurgen Klopp might be nearing the end of his time at Anfield. Then they went on a brilliant run that made you think they might be really good again. Then they ended the season with a bit of a whimper and found themselves out of the Champions League.
Then in the summer the midfield reboot they needed to think about over the next year or two suddenly became infinitely more urgent thanks to Saudi Arabia and Jordan Henderson’s moral flexibility.
So we had absolutely no idea what to make of them going into this season, but we were nevertheless reasonably confident that Szoboszlai-Mac Allister-Gakpo had no long-term future as a midfield three and that this would require significant attention. We’re still sure of that, but far more confident now that said attention has arrived.
It’s maybe a tad early for all the Steven Gerrard comparisons to come out, but Dominic Szoboszlai is everything we hoped he’d be and more and we’d expect Ryan Gravenberch’s quietly encouraging performances to become louder, more frequent and much more Premier than Europa League based over the weeks and months to come. The suspicion at this early stage is that his Bayern Munich struggles were an eminently understandable blip and, given the current going rate for really good central midfielders and Liverpool’s dire need, they may just have got themselves an absurd bargain there.
The point here really is that Liverpool had the guts ripped out of a midfield that already needed attention and they’ve had to do a rush job on it. But the good news is that they suffered no significant damage to their season while completing that rush job and things are only likely to get better from here on.
They’ve lost once all season – in quite staggeringly unfortunate fashion – and have the chance to go top of the table if they win the first game back after the international break, and that game is at home against Everton so, you know, quite likely they will do that. Liverpool are back, Klopp is back. Shame he drank the Replay Kool-Aid, but one can’t have everything.
2) Arsenal sticking around at the summit
Not sure it’s entirely surprising, but there was enough doubt around it to get it in here, we reckon. Let’s face it, nobody expected Arsenal to do what they did last season. Apart from the April and May bottlings, obviously. Those were pretty predictable. But all the good stuff from August to March to make those bottlings a possibility? Taking the title fight to Manchester City in a way nobody not called Jurgen Klopp had managed in half a decade? That was great and pretty much entirely unexpected.
Having failed to hang on and actually win the title, though, it would all have been for nought if Arsenal simply slunk back to a top-four challenge this season. They fully went for it in the summer, sensing a chance that may not come again to properly re-establish themselves among the very best and they’ve reached mid-October sitting second in the league on goals scored, ahead of Manchester City who they’ve just beaten for the first time in the league since the internet was in black and white, and best of all they’ve shown almost no evidence that they’re yet operating anywhere near their ceiling.
Whether it’s enough to actually dethrone a Manchester City side who nearly always grow stronger as the season progresses who knows, but for a second straight season the question is at least one that merits asking. Considering where Arsenal were a couple of years ago, that’s really quite something.
1) Tottenham’s defending
Spurs have been pretty surprising full stop as we all wait patiently for it to go all to shit as it surely must. But the attacking enterprise hasn’t been that surprising. The speed with which Angeball has taken hold maybe is, the sheer extent of James Maddison’s elevation to new levels above even what we thought he had in him. But in general the surprise at Spurs’ attacking endeavours is one of scale. We thought they’d be good going forward, and they are good going forward.
What we didn’t remotely anticipate was that they would be wildly competent at the back. They’ve only conceded eight goals this season and that is definitely the maddest part of their antics when you think about it. Only four teams have conceded fewer goals, and none of those four have scored as many as Spurs. And this is all happening with a defence that had barely been introduced to one another before the season began.
Guglielmo Vicario, Destiny Udogie, and Micky van de Ven all made their Premier League debuts in the opening 2-2 draw at Brentford, while Pedro Porro arrived only six months earlier and was widely regarded – by us, mainly – as a carelessly Conte-specific wing-back signing who had no place in any system that called for full-backs instead. Both goals they conceded in that opening game came after Cristian Romero was withdrawn with a head injury.
Romero, handed significant leadership responsibilities as the grown-up in that defence, has flourished as well. He’s in the conversation for best centre-back of the season so far, and only very occasionally these days looks like he’s going to do something absurdly unnecessary involving slide tackles, studs, shins and the halfway line.
We all got so excited to see Spurs finally replace Christian Eriksen and wonder how they might go about replacing Harry Kane that none of us really noticed that on the quiet they’d sneakily and at long last also come up with replacements for peak Lloris, Walker, Rose, Alderweireld and Vertonghen.