Liverpool edge ever closer to the title, Nottingham Forest stubbornly refuse to regress to the mean, significant moves in the Champions League chase and even the soon-to-be-relegated clubs picking up some points.
Welcome back, Premier League. How we have missed you.
Winners
Liverpool
As we said after the game, it felt like Liverpool needed that more than those of us on the outside looking in may have realised. Twenty-five days is a long time to go without winning any football matches no matter how chunky your lead at the top of the table may be.
Liverpool were nowhere near their best against an Everton side who were predictably stubborn and organised at the back while, certainly in the first half, posing enough of a threat on the counter-attack to keep the home side honest and wary. But they got the three points in the end, and Liverpool are firmly at the stage of the season now where for them that really is all that matters.
Eke out three points another handful of times and the job will be done. It doesn’t have to be pretty now.
Diogo Jota
The manner in which he took the chance when it came, all quick feet and even speedier thought, was not what one might expect of a man without a goal in his previous 10 Liverpool games.
Perhaps sometimes you don’t just need one to go in off your backside but instead to jink away from three defenders before sending the keeper the wrong way. But there’s no denying that lacks the same co-commentator pith.
Alexis Mac Allister
His leg is still in one piece. A huge win.
READ: PGMOL reviews own review of Tarkowski tackle and now agrees with everyone else
Nottingham Forest
Those who’ve been waiting patiently for the regression to the mean still wait. Having completed a league double over Manchester United, Forest now sit eight points clear of sixth-placed Chelsea and after another midweek in which several of the teams below them took points off each other look better placed than ever to be in next season’s Champions League.
And another clean sheet means they still boast the best home defensive record in the league. For a team who had the fourth worst home defensive record in the league last season, it’s quite the transformation.
Matz Sels
Another clean sheet after his FA Cup penalty heroics to leave him two clear of David Raya in the race for the Golden Glove.
Anthony Elanga
A stunning – although inexplicably and ridiculously unopposed – solo goal to beat his former club to reaffirm Elanga’s place in Man United’s Big List Of Costly Mistakes.
Although there is simply no avoiding the question now about whether United are terrible judges of which players are worth keeping and which should be discarded, or whether it’s simply the case that getting away from Old Trafford is itself enough to liberate players to reach their full potential. Because there’s a great deal of evidence for the latter currently knocking around the Premier League and elsewhere.
And that question itself raises another thorny one for Man United to consider. Which of those two options is actually the worst?
Ipswich
A first Premier League win of 2025 to secure a rare spot in the top half of this feature for Kieran McKenna, Ed Sheeran and co.
It isn’t on its own enough to make the relegation fight interesting again, but if the Tractor Boys can now just summon up the energy and endeavour to London Bus their way to another win over Wolves at the weekend, then we can talk.
Liam Delap
Has surely secured his place in next season’s Premier League, at least.
Aston Villa
A vital win in the top-five race, and one that shifts the whole feel of the fight. Had Villa lost at Brighton it would have looked an awfully long road to get back into the equation to try and nab a place in next season’s Champions League without having to go to all the fuss and rigmarole and hassle of winning this year’s.
Instead, after a thoroughly convincing win, Villa find themselves only a couple of points adrift. Newcastle and Chelsea directly above them still have games in hand, but really nobody outside the top three is winning compellingly often these days. Villa have every chance, and the opportunity this weekend to drag Forest back into it and make it a fight for third, fourth and fifth rather than just fourth and fifth.
Rashford, Asensio, Malen and Monchi
We all kind of suspected, we think, that Rashford might do quite well having escaped the Old Trafford Goldfish Bowl. That Villa was a canny loan move on his part, joining a very good team, a Champions League team, but one where the spotlight shines that bit dimmer. Just an easier environment all round in which to simply get on with his football.
But Marco Asensio? It was an exciting and eye-catching signing, sure, and there is no questioning his quality. But we’d have laid good money in him being underwhelming in reality. This is our failing not his, but Asensio just never seemed like a Barclays-coded footballer at all.
We certainly didn’t anticipate his Villa career involving him scoring goals from a corner literally once every hour. That is an excellent tactic, and we don’t know why nobody else had thought of it before.
Villa’s sporting director Monchi could be feeling pretty chipper about things even before Donyell Malen – up to know a slight blot on that magnificent January copybook – popped up with a goal of his own.
Three goals in a vital win scored by three separate January acquisitions. It can’t have happened too often before.
Newcastle United
Perhaps the timing of the international break helped, but it would have been pretty understandable had Newcastle’s league efforts come slightly unmoored in the wake of the sheer emotional heft of that Carabao Cup victory at Wembley.
And Brentford at home looked every inch the ‘back to earth with a bump’ fixture; one Newcastle ought to win, would expect to win, but would be by no means certain to win.
When Brentford drew level midway through the second half it wouldn’t have been a huge shock to find Newcastle struggling to summon the energy to go again. But go again they did to secure three points that keep them firmly in position to add Champions League qualification to a season already guaranteed a spot in Geordie folklore.
Alexander Isak
Twenty league goals for Newcastle in successive Premier League seasons for Isak. You know who never scored 20 league goals for Newcastle in successive Premier League seasons? Fraud of Fraud Hall himself Alan Shearer.
Only Mo Salah’s statistically insane season.) has now produced more goals and assists combined than Isak’s 25, and he now stands clear as the Premier League’s most complete all-round centre-forward.
It’s little wonder everyone else wants to sign him, but he is rapidly approaching the status achieved by Harry Kane in his final years at Tottenham where almost no sum of money Newcastle might get for Isak is worth it because there is almost no chance they would be able to reinvest it in such a way that they come out in better shape without him. He’s just too good.
Jack Grealish
There are plenty of reasons why Jack Grealish doesn’t often get to play in his actual preferred central No. 10 position for Man City but it’s still bizarre that it’s happened quite so infrequently.
Handed a rare chance to impress in that position against a team as shoddy as Leicester was one Grealish couldn’t afford to pass up and one he did not pass up.
Whether it helps earn him a second chance in City’s own longer-term plans or assists him in getting a move to somewhere he’ll get more of these kinds of opportunities where he’s best able to impact games, there was no harm at all in seeing what he remains capable of doing when the circumstances are right and the stars align.
Welcome back, Jack.
Bukayo Saka
Of course he scored on his return from injury, stepping off the bench to breathe new life and energy into an Arsenal attack gone horribly stale in his absence.
And of course the return of one key Arsenal man from a long-term hamstring injury was obliged to coincide with the loss of another to seemingly the same. Just powerfully on point for Arsenal 24/25, that.
Wolves
It’s taken them longer than they would have liked, but they’ve finally joined the likes of West Ham and Everton in bridging the gap from relegation straggler to lower mid-table wasters alongside your Tottenhams and Man Uniteds.
Even when the bottom four was still clearly a bottom four, it always felt like Wolves were the ones who didn’t quite belong in that group, the ones who had the wherewithal to string together a run of results that might ease them clear of the moribund bottom three.
Tuesday night’s win over West Ham made it 13 points from their last seven games. Precisely the sort of run needed, and precisely what none of the bottom three are capable of producing.
Ipswich’s surprise win at Bournemouth the following night means Wolves do still need to take a little bit of care for this weekend’s trip to Portman Road but avoid defeat there – and all but one of 15 previous visitors this season have managed at least that – and they really should be fine.
Southampton
A point! Double figures! A trip to Spurs, where both Ipswich and Leicester have already won this season, coming up at the weekend!
Everything’s coming up Southampton. That Derby record is tantalisingly close now.
Losers
Arsenal
Such is life. Not really fair, this. Not really Arsenal’s fault, either. But it does feel like this has to be where they land this week, all things considered.
Arsenal’s season teeters so delicately on the edge right now that even with their win over Fulham, the week feels like a net loss. Most basically, any round of matches now in which they don’t close the gap on Liverpool makes the already tiny chance of reeling them in that much harder, but we wouldn’t have them in here for that alone.
No, what has kicked Arsenal directly up the, well, arse this week is the sky-high cost of a victory over Fulham that just really wasn’t worth it in the end.
Welcoming Bukayo Saka back from his hamstring injury was wonderful, of course, and there was a sense of inevitability about that goal. But to have him come back on the same night they lose Gabriel Magalhaes to another hamstring injury is brutal.
This has surely been the best season of Gabriel’s career, one in which he has perhaps outshone even William Saliba in the heart of that Arsenal defence. It’s a tough call to make either way, really, so indelibly linked with each other’s excellence have they become.
But he now surely at the very, very least misses the Champions League quarter-final games against Real Madrid, while Ben White has suffered a setback in his own recovery and Jurrien Timber also limped off against the Cottagers.
With Riccardo Calafiori and Takehiro Tomiyasu also still out, Arsenal now find themselves alarmingly short of depth and quality at both ends of the pitch at the worst possible time.
Gabriel Magalhaes
Every chance we’ve seen the last of him this season. A brutal setback at a brutal time for a man playing the best football of his career.
Bournemouth
We still just cannot get our heads round Bournemouth. They always look like either a top-four team or a relegation team, but absolutely never anything in between.
It can change at the flick of a switch, but they are capable of staying in either state for a disarmingly long period of time. They shifted between those two states throughout last season, and they’ve been relentlessly at it again this time around
They must now surely, though, have taken this to its elastic limit.
A couple of months ago they were winning back-to-back games against Newcastle (fourth at the time) and Nottingham Forest (third then and now) 4-1 and 5-0 to stretch their unbeaten run to 11 games and make Champions League qualification a very real possibility.
Since when they have taken four points from seven games, with their only win coming against Southampton which literally hardly counts.
While it will, admittedly, take an army of top soccer boffins decades of painstaking study and research to fathom precisely how Bournemouth contrived not to win at Spurs last month (although the answer probably involves the words ‘Guglielmo’ and ‘Vicario’ quite prominently) the point they got at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium represents their sole reward from their last five games, culminating in this week’s 2-1 home defeat to an Ipswich side that had collected only two league points in the first three months of the year.
The net result of this bizarre lurching from one extreme to the other is, unsurprisingly, a spot right in the middle of the table. Which is broadly fine, because it is still Bournemouth after all, but it’s a simply maddening way to go about it.
Andoni Iraola
Sweet timing with this current bad run just as he was being most strongly linked with Tottenham and the Impossible Job. But it’s not like this is the first time his Bournemouth side have hit the buffers.
Assuming that at some point down the line he would like a Big Club Job that isn’t guaranteed to ruin him then it is something he’s going to have to sort out. It’s nearly two whole seasons of this stuff now; it’s far beyond the point where it can be explained away by coincidence, luck or happenstance.
Manchester United
So much for that seven-game unbeaten run, then. It was never the most compelling corner-turning, given the nature of the teams defeated and the fact it was an unbeaten run that also contained a penalty shoot-out defeat. But it was something.
Then on Tuesday night they fell for the most obvious Nottingham Forest trap imaginable. If you were going to script the way Forest might win that game against a team as relentlessly, infuriatingly stupid as United, it would go something like: 1-0, counter-attack goal, United have all of the ball and most of the chances. Tick, tick, tick. Silly, silly sods.
United have become a painfully predictable side now. They have been able to consistently beat the very worst this Premier League has to offer, taking 16 points from 18 against the soon-to-be-relegated trio.
And they can summon something up from deep within themselves to cosplay as something approaching a proper United side for the biggest games against the teams that used to be their rivals, taking points off Liverpool, Arsenal, City and Chelsea this season.
Against everyone else, they are just rotten. Consistently and thoroughly.
Crystal Palace
They’ve reached the comforting familiarity of 40 points earlier than usual, but nobody can be happy with a home draw against Southampton this season. It shouldn’t ultimately prevent Palace from smashing that 50-point barrier at long, long last but we must admit we’d factored a full three points into our calculations.
Ten points from nine games should still be a cakewalk, but does require a slightly higher overall points-per-game effort than they’ve just managed in what is by definition one of the easiest fixtures in the entire history of the Premier League. We can’t help but feel nervous now.
James Tarkowski
Absurdly fortunate to get away with the single most Knew Exactly What He Was Doing challenge ever attempted in the Premier League by a defender who isn’t Cristian Romero.
Having left his mark so thrillingly on the first Merseyside Derby of the season, an undeniable shame to see him do so this way in the second.
Paul Tierney
We’ve a degree of sympathy for on-field referee Sam Barrott’s failure to send Tarkowski off. Decisions like that, where the defender’s contact with the ball is so obvious and it’s how and what they’ve done on the follow-through that matters are never entirely easy to judge on one full-speed, real-time view in any circumstances, never mind 10 minutes into a major local derby. His reaching for the yellow card was wrong, but just about understandably so.
There is no such mitigation for VAR man Paul Tierney. This was a textbook opportunity for a Great To See VAR Work Well scenario. This was Exactly What VAR Is There For. And he completely and inexplicably fluffed it.
Only he will know quite what he saw in the brief handful of seconds it took him to clear Tarkowski of further punishment, but it surely can’t have been anything anyone else spotted.