Arsenal blood pressure, Guardiola’s bunker mentality and PGMOL feature in winners and losers

Ian King
PGMOL are under the spotlight aafter VAR failed to rulke out an Arsenal goal against Brentford

Lopetegui, Rashford and Toney all win this week, while one of the big losers may be the blood pressure of Arsenal supporters after two without a win.

 

Winners

The Premier League’s fixture computer
The tendency to cluster derby matches together in the schedules has been a feature of the Premier League for some time now, and you can only imagine that whoever came up with the fixtures for this particular weekend sat back with a very satisfied grin on their face once they were done.

This weekend’s fixtures featured The Definitely Not The A23 or M23 Derby (Crystal Palace vs Brighton), The War of the Roses Derby (Leeds vs Manchester United), The Jack Grealish Derby (Manchester City vs Aston Villa), The Eddie Howe Derby (Bournemouth vs Newcastle) and even, for the historians amongst us, The Arsenal Stadium Mystery Derby (Arsenal vs Brentford).

Now admittedly, at least one of these is so obscure that it may not have been intentional. The Arsenal Stadium Mystery is interesting as a time capsule of pre-war 1939, but is otherwise a fairly hokey murder mystery film. But we should probably doff our caps to the individual who managed to cluster these fixtures – the not quite local derbies – together in such a way that I spent at least half on hour on Friday trying to work out what the subliminal connection between Southampton and Wolves might be.

 

The City of Manchester
In some respects this wasn’t a terribly good week for the two Manchester behemoths, with Premier League charges against City that overshadowed everything else in the news cycle and a combination of injury and suspension that suddenly ripped the heart of out United’s central midfield.

But when the weekend did come around, it turned out to be very satisfactory indeed. City swept to a comfortable win against Aston Villa, while United bounced back from their 2-2 draw against Leeds during the week by travelling to Elland Road and coming away with all three points.

The good news didn’t end there. Other than Fulham, the two Manchester clubs were the only teams in the Premier League’s top 12 to win over the course of the weekend (with Liverpool still to play).

City’s win trimmed Arsenal’s lead at the top of the table to three points with the two teams meeting in their delayed first meeting of the season this week, while United’s opened up the gap between themselves and fifth-placed Spurs – more on whom later – to seven points. A good weekend for the city of Manchester at the end of a trying week.

 

Brendan Rodgers’ Freewheelin’ Leicester City
There may no more mystifying team in the Premier League at the moment than Leicester City. Prior to the break for the fourth round of the FA Cup they’d taken just one point from their previous five league games, but since then not only have they won both their matches, they’ve scored eight (EIGHT) goals in the process. Their 4-2 win at Aston Villa a week earlier had been impressive enough, but their 4-1 win against an admittedly supine Spurs lifted them six points from the relegation places and will have gone a long way towards allaying fears on the part of their supporters.

 

Julen Lopetegui
When appointed as the manager of Wolves on November 14, Julen Lopetegui was stepping into a potentially reputation-shredding situation. His new charges had taken just four points from their previous nine matches and were 19th in the table.

Seven games on, confidence around Molineux has already returned in spades. Wolves have won four and drawn one of Lopetegui’s seven Premier League games in charge, with their only defeats coming against Manchesters City and United.

Their win at Southampton, although it came against a club that was just bottoming out in terms of their failed Nathan Jones experiment, was another example of how Lopetegui has breathed life back into his players. Regardless of the state of the opposition, coming from a goal behind to win away from home with ten men is a test of character that his players definitely passed.

 

Pep Guardiola’s bunker mentality
Time will tell whether local derbies against Maine Road FC end up as part of Manchester City’s calendar by the end of the decade, but for now Pep Guardiola’s job is to keep on keeping on, and arguably the worst week in the club’s season so far ended with one of the best sets of results.

Starting with a pre-match tifo featuring the lawyer who’ll be acting for them in the case brought against them by the Premier League – which, gauche as it may seem from the outside, at least sums up just about where elite level football is in 2023 – this was an afternoon of defiance at the Etihad Stadium which also extended to the team.

City blew Aston Villa away in the first half, a performance redolent of the times when they seemed to do this in almost every game. Guardiola’s bunker mentality may have invited external criticism, but with the Premier League’s leaders being relatively inexperienced in their existing position, the trimming of Arsenal’s lead at the top of the table to three points with a shock and awe 45 minutes, the early signs are that the manager will be using this mentality to bind his team back together.

 

Marcus Rashford (again)
For all the talk of the extent to which new signings such as Casemiro, Christian Eriksen and Lisandro Martinez have transformed Manchester United’s fortunes this season, it remains the case that arguably their best addition has been the return of Marcus Rashford following a difficult couple of years.

With 10 minutes to play at Elland Road on Sunday afternoon, things were starting to get tense. Having earned a point from their meeting at Old Trafford during the week, Leeds were giving as good as they got for the second game in a row, and with the score still goalless a febrile game between two bitter enemies was very much in the balance. But then Rashford popped up to head them into the lead, and the previous 80 minutes’ insecurities just melted away.

Rashford has now scored 12 Premier League goals this season, including one in each of his last four successive games. There may be a tiny risk that United could become over-dependent on his goals – no-one else has scored more than five for them in the league, and January transfer window loanee Wout Weghorst already looks a little like the answer to a question nobody asked – but none of this really matters while United are winning matches – they’ve now won seven of their last 10.

For all the big money signings, it is the return of this one player to form under Erik ten Hag that is keeping them in touch at the top of the table. In the last nine days alone, Rashford has scored the winning goal against Crystal Palace, the goal that kick-started their comeback at home to Leeds and the deadlock-breaker in their return game at Elland Road.

 

Manor Solomon
To say that Manor Solomon had a difficult 2022 would be understating things somewhat. Having been at Shakhtar Donetsk as Russian tanks rumbled into Ukraine, the second half of his last season consisted only of friendly matches with his domestic league campaign over. He was allowed to escape the war-torn country in the summer and a new opportunity in the Premier League on loan with Fulham might be considered landing on one’s feet, but in the middle of August he injured his knee in a behind-closed-doors friendly match which kept him out until the new year.

Solomon came on in the 72nd minute of Fulham’s game against Nottingham Forest on Saturday afternoon, and 16 minutes later scored his first goal for the club to sew up a 2-0 win which nudged the Cottagers up to seventh place and kept the possibility of qualifying for European football for next season very much on the Craven Cottage agenda. Here’s hoping that Solomon has a more settled 2023.

 

Newcastle supporters who do the pools
It was a nifty bit of sleight of hand to turn the longest journey that Newcastle supporters will have to make for a league game this season into a derby, and those who travelled the 350 miles down to the Dorset coast may well have ended up a little disappointed that their team couldn’t make up much ground on those above them with a 1-1 draw.

But at least those who gamble on the draw may have ended up a little happier. The Bournemouth stalemate was Newcastle’s 11th Premier League draw in 22 games so far this season, which is good news for those who routinely pick them out on their weekly pools coupon. Eddie Howe might not have been quite so happy at dropping two points against the second-bottom team in the division, but at least Newcastle supporters who bet on the draw will have had some beer money to make that extremely long journey a little more palatable.

 

Ivan Toney
‘Immediately after Brentford’s game against Arsenal, Ivan Toney received a barrage of abusive, racist direct messages via his Instagram account. We are disgusted and saddened that Ivan has had to deal with this yet again.’

‘No one should have to face abuse of the kind received by Ivan Toney. It has no place in football or society. We are supporting Ivan and the club with investigations. The Premier League condemns all forms of discrimination. Football is for everyone.’

Not even for the first time this season, Brentford and the Premier League have had to respond to a torrent of racist abuse thrown at one of their players. And what did Toney actually do to ‘warrant’ this abuse? He, um, scored a goal that the referee, the referee’s assistants and VAR failed to spot during a sensational striker’s performance to give Brentford a 1-1 draw at Arsenal on Saturday.

There is no justification for racist abuse, and to send this sort of thing to a player for doing what they are paid to do (and what they’re expected to do) says more about the actual stupidity required than anything else. But in the meantime Toney keeps on scoring these goals – it’s not up to him to decide whether a goal is offside or not and it wasn’t even him in an offside position in this case – and keeping Brentford on the fringes of a challenge for a place in Europe next season.

 

Losers

PGMOL
‘PGMOL can confirm its Chief Refereeing Officer Howard Webb has contacted both Arsenal and Brighton to acknowledge and explain the significant errors in the VAR process in their respective Premier League fixtures on Saturday. Both incidents, which were due to human error and related to the analysis of offside situations, are being thoroughly reviewed by PGMOL.’

So read a statement following the errors on Saturday, a state of affairs that seems have become a regular occurrence for the referees’ group. There’s a case for saying that we have to accept “human error” as part of the refereeing experience, but that is explicitly not the direction that football has chosen to take in the 21st century.

The introduction of VAR promised – whether implicitly or explicitly – that objectivity would be the order of the day from then on, but this isn’t happening. Every week seems to bring fresh controversies and occasional apologies, but this will butter few parsnips in Brighton or Islington. At what point are the errors going to end and promises made on behalf of VAR going to come good?

Some might say that they can’t, even with the best will in the world, but regardless of whether this is the case or not, it continues to feel as though we’re sliding further and further away from the promises that were made over how it would be administered, even if those promises were imperfect in the first place. If officials can’t routinely get decisions right even with the interjection of the Roboref, it makes you wonder what the point of having it in the first place is.

 

Graham Potter
In some respects, a 1-1 draw away to a West Ham team that has been improving of late wasn’t that bad a result for Chelsea, but Graham Potter has still only won two Premier League games since the middle of October and the mood among supporters is already starting to get more than a little restless.

Chelsea remain 10 points off a Champions League place, and although the club continue to talk up the long-term aspects of his appointment, the sheer amount of money spent during the January transfer window has only added to the pressure that he’s under to start delivering results immediately. Should Chelsea fail to get through their upcoming Champions League tie against Borussia Dortmund, that will build still further, and failing to capitalise on almost everybody above them in the table dropping points on the same weekend hardly supports the case that he’s starting to slowly turn the team’s fortunes around on the pitch.

 

Erling Haaland
Does two games constitute a ‘goal drought’ when the player concerned has otherwise been averaging more than a goal a game previously throughout a season?

It won’t be Haaland’s patently obvious and uncurable slump in front of goal that’s vexing supporters when it comes to their Nordic goal machine and the comfortable win against Aston Villa. Their big concern will be that he had to be withdrawn from that win at half-time and is now doubtful for their upcoming top-of-the-table game against Arsenal.

In the past Haaland has had a bit of a reputation for being injury-prone, but this hadn’t been a major concern this season. With City needing a win to keep the pressure up on their opponents, the timing of this particular injury couldn’t have been much worse.

 

The blood pressure of Arsenal supporters
Perhaps it’s a reflection upon just how brilliant the first half of their season was that it’s only taken a failure to win two games for the atmosphere surrounding Arsenal’s surprise championship challenge to start looking a little frayed. When you’ve won all but two of your previous league games in a season, dropping points twice in a row can look worse than it might otherwise have done.

Losing to Everton was a bad result, but it did come about in the very strange circumstances of their opponents playing as though they’d actually been given instructions before the match for the first time in many, many months. And while Arsenal will always expect to beat Brentford at home, taking a point from a match against a team in the top half of the table is a minor distraction rather than a season-altering disaster.

But to fail to win these two matches in succession shortly before a game that has been trailed as potentially season-defining is hardly helpful to Mikel Arteta. Ten points from four games against Brighton, Newcastle, Spurs and Manchester United before their brief break for the FA Cup fourth round should have left them in fine fettle, but they have looked a little anaemic since then. All the arguing about VAR or refereeing errors only partially masks that. We might expect Arsenal supporters’ blood to reach something approaching the consistency of Tizer on Wednesday night.

PGMOL are under the spotlight aafter VAR failed to rulke out an Arsenal goal against Brentford

 

Spurs. Just Spurs.
There is a certain artfulness to the way in which Spurs’ season is starting to fall apart at the seams. First came the Juventus scandal, which seems likely to lead to a ban for director of football Fabio Paratici, and then came Antonio Conte’s gall bladder deciding that it had seen enough.

To this can now be added long-term injuries to goalkeeper Hugo Lloris and Rodrigo Bentancur, and while some Spurs supporters may contend that replacing Lloris might not even be the worst thing that could happen to them, for this sort of thing to be happening shortly after the closure of the transfer window says something for how the football Gods have been treating Spurs these last few weeks.

Of course, none of this mither behind the scenes would count for nearly as much if the results were still flowing, but Spurs reached a new level of peak Spursiness for this season in losing 4-1 to Leicester City just six days after beating Manchester City at home. Is there another Premier League team who could have managed such a contrast in the space of a week?

After the match, assistant manager Cristian Stellini said that Spurs “have to be better mentally”. Tell us something we haven’t known for at least the last thirty years, Cristian.

 

Nathan Jones
It seems doubtful that many Southampton supporters will be considering that Jones has been gone too long this morning. Saturday’s home defeat against Wolves proved to be the tipping point for his 95 days as the manager of their club, with some even noting the club’s lack of thanks for his efforts in their statement concerning his sacking.

Jones leaves St Mary’s embarrassed by his own hubris and having won just one of his eight Premier League matches, losing all four home games. He may be able to point to that EFL Cup win against Manchester City as being a high point, but they were comfortably beaten in the next round of that competition by Newcastle so even that boast would now ring a little hollow.

 

Rasmus Ankersen
But we should be absolutely clear that this isn’t solely on Jones. After all, the decision to hire him in the first place was taken by club director of football Rasmus Ankersen, by all accounts because of an over-reliance on statistics which showed Jones to be far better value as a manager than he actually turned out to be. Ankersen was not dissuaded by Jones’s previous spell away from Kenilworth Road at Stoke, where he was sacked after just nine months, nor by the fact that Luton in the Championship is a wildly different football environment to Southampton fighting to stay in the Premier League. This was an appointment which demonstrated the new owners’ shortcomings, and it’s not a mistake that they can afford to repeat in any way whatsoever.

 

Willy Boly and Scott McKenna
Losing 2-0 to Fulham ended the five-game unbeaten run which has lifted Forest from the Premier League relegation places towards mid-table, and the source of their defeat may have been one of the stranger double injuries that we’ll see all season.

The game at Craven Cottage had been going for just six minutes when Steve Cooper was forced into not one but two substitutions, with Scott McKenna and Willy Boly both going off injured with hamstring problems. It was the quickest double-substitution in the history of the Premier League, and if Cooper had pause to think that it might be a bad omen for the rest of the afternoon, he was right. 

 

Leeds and Manchester United ‘tragedy chanters’
The most striking irony of all is that the Leeds supporters who were singing vile songs about the Munich disaster and the Manchester United supporters who were singing vile songs about Istanbul at Elland Road on Sunday will most likely have been among those getting the most offended at Manchester United supporters singing vile songs about Istanbul and Leeds supporters singing vile songs about the Munich disaster at Elland Road on Sunday. Two cheeks of the same arse, the lot of them.

Winners & Losers Erling Haaland

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