Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s Premier League football.
This was the weekend when Manchester City recorded a convincing scoreline (if not performance) against West Ham, Chelsea dropped more points, Newcastle’s fine form continued and Southampton arguably reached a new low with their 5-0 home defeat to Brentford.
Here we will ask if the remainder of the Premier League campaign is a confusing mess, whether Ruben Amorim has found his best team and whether Arsenal have a 1-0 problem.
Can you predict a most unpredictable season?
We’re just past the halfway point of the Premier League season, and by now most of the ‘narratives’, for want of a better word, should be pretty well established.
We should probably have a good idea of who will finish in the top four. We should probably have a good idea of who is going to be relegated. We should probably have a good idea of how the table will end up.
And yet, not much seems set in stone.
It’s Liverpool’s title to lose. Southampton require a couple of miracles to survive. But beyond that, can you confidently predict anything else about the remainder of the campaign?
Arsenal keep dropping points, Chelsea are going through a dip that was perhaps inevitable, Manchester United are their own thing, Manchester City still don’t look completely free of their funk despite winning two games in a row, Tottenham are… well, let’s not get started on Tottenham.
Nottingham Forest have been the surprise success story of the season, but are they going to drop away? Logically you would think so, but their position in third place is not a false one, so who knows?
Of the others who could crash the Champions League places, Newcastle currently appear to be the best placed but a few weeks ago they looked completely lost and are potentially an Alexander Isak injury away from trouble. Aston Villa have been inconsistent since October and they will be back on Champions League duty in a few weeks, which could complicate domestic matters further.
Fulham have looked impressive but they keep drawing games. Brighton haven’t won in eight. Brentford’s home form had propped them up but they’ve now lost their last two at the Gtech. Crystal Palace have turned their form around but are still closer to the relegation zone than you’d like. Things were looking up for West Ham but they won’t be seeing their best player, Jarrod Bowen, for a while.
And as for those who could take the other two relegation places, you’d be better off throwing a dart at four names rather than using logic to predict which of Everton, Wolves, Leicester and Ipswich will drop.
This, we should say, is not a complaint. Unpredictability and inconsistency are usually much more entertaining than the alternative.
But as we enter a new year and the second half of this Premier League season, how the next few months will pan out is frankly anyone’s guess.
Has Ruben Amorim found his best team?
Ruben Amorim has been Manchester United manager for 12 games in all competitions now. His first game was only seven weeks ago and if it feels much longer than that to you, imagine how long it has felt to him.
There must have been times when he wondered what on earth he had done, giving up a cushy procession to the title in Portugal for the rolling chaos of Old Trafford. His recent admission that United could get relegated sounded less like a realistic assessment of their prospects and more like a cry for help.
Now though, a positive. There was a time when a point at Anfield would have been a huge disappointment, but for this iteration of Manchester United it’s almost a victory. It’s arguably a better result than beating Manchester City a few weeks ago, given the existential crisis City were enduring at the time.
That is encouraging enough, but maybe more so could be that he has found his best team. Amorim has essentially been experimenting for this first block of time in charge: he’s tried three different players at centre-forward, Noussair Mazraoui in central defence and wing-back, Diogo Dalot on the right and the left, Amad at wing-back and No 10, Bruno Fernandes deep and more advanced, and five different combinations as the twin No 10s.
But has he now found his best starting XI, of the players currently available to him? There seems to be a good balance with Kobbie Mainoo and Manuel Ugarte, who are much more mobile than Casemiro and Christian Eriksen, Rasmus Hojlund is the obvious choice at No 9 and the way Fernandes and Amad complement each other looks promising.
Dalot caused Liverpool lots of problems (Alex Livesey – Danehouse/Getty Images)
Maybe ideally you’d want Leny Yoro rather than Matthijs de Ligt, and while this is effectively the side that beat City (Mason Mount started but went off injured after 14 minutes) it’s also the side that lost to Wolves.
Clearly, he still has plenty of problems. They might want to recruit a specialist wing-back in the transfer window, which is easier said than done. There will be more limp defeats, more strained performances. This probably won’t be the catalyst for a glorious second half of the season. Would you be totally shocked if they didn’t beat Southampton in their next league game?
But at the very least, this side represents something to work with.
Is 1-0 to the Arsenal becoming a dangerous scoreline?
Should it have been a penalty?
Probably. But also maybe not. Mikel Arteta certainly didn’t think so, claiming that he’d “never seen a decision like this”, after Anthony Taylor pointed to the spot, following the clash of heads between William Saliba and Joao Pedro in Arsenal’s 1-1 draw with Brighton.
Either way, it ultimately served as a convenient distraction for another two points dropped by Arsenal, made even more infuriating for them after Liverpool also failed to win this weekend. Arsenal are now six points behind Arne Slot’s side, who still have that game in hand, and the thought that it could easily have been a much more encouraging four point gap will weigh heavily.
There are caveats with this result. Arsenal started the game without Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard, Kai Havertz and Gabriel Martinelli. Take any side’s first choice attack away and see how they manage.
But they were still able to get a half and 26 minutes out of Martinelli and Odegaard respectively. And the point of being a title challenger is that you’re supposed to be able to pick up wins without your best players every now and then. Which, in fairness, they have done in the last couple of games.
The broader concern is that this is becoming a pattern. As the chart above shows, this was the fourth time this season that Arsenal have taken the lead and only managed a draw: only two other teams have done so more times. Liverpool haven’t at all.
And the chart below shows us that it’s a bad habit that looks to be increasing this season. We’re only halfway through the campaign, and they have already dropped points after going 1-0 up more times than in the whole of last season.
Their passivity after taking the lead isn’t just confined to games they went on to draw. They went ahead in the 23rd minute against Ipswich and were arguably fortunate to win that one 1-0. It was similar against Shakhtar Donetsk in the Champions League.
There have been games where they did press on and made sure a victory was safe from the vagaries of refereeing decisions, like against Crystal Palace and Brentford recently. But Brighton hadn’t won any of their previous seven games and, even with their absences, Arsenal should have put the game beyond them well before the penalty.
If Arsenal don’t convincingly challenge Liverpool this season, then it will be their own fault, not a referee’s.
Coming up this week
- The weekend’s Premier League fixtures conclude with the long awaited repeat of the 1980 League Cup final, as Wolves host Nottingham Forest, Also known as the ‘Who Loves Nuno More? Clasico.’ Forest can go level on points with second-placed Arsenal if they win: they’d need a victory by 15 goals to go above them, and you may write that off as implausible but Forest’s whole season is pretty implausible, so…
- Tuesday sees the first of the Carabao Cup semi-final first legs, and it begins with Arsenal and Newcastle, two teams who you simply do not associate with the competition, despite both reaching the final relatively recently.
- Then on Wednesday, Ange Postecoglou’s “I always win something in my second season, mate” prophecy gets properly stress-tested, as Tottenham face Liverpool in their first leg.
- On Thursday, the FA Cup weekend begins remarkably early, like when they release films halfway through the week so they can beef up their opening weekend numbers. The early fixtures are pretty low key, although there is the faint whiff of a prospective upset with League One Peterborough against increasingly beleaguered Everton. It’s Aston Villa vs West Ham on Friday, and then the meat of the draw comes next Saturday.
- And finally, the transfer window is open. David Ornstein has been activated and all of The Athletic’s club reporters are on the case as your team makes that shrewd addition/flamboyantly overpays for a panic buy/makes that weird loan signing to keep an agent sweet.
