Arsenal's Noni Madueke, Manchester City manager Enzo Maresca and Spurs midfielder Rodrigo Bentancur
It's Monday, you know what that means...
Noni Madueke, David Moyes and Rodrigo Muniz are Premier League winners. Unai Emery, both Manchester club and a Spurs jinx are big old losers.
Bloody international breaks.
Premier League winners
Nottingham Forest
On their way to the title.
Brighton Their last 10 Premier League wins have been to nil, through 25 unanswered goals. If Brighton score first, the game is basically done.
And if Brighton field Pascal Gross, as they invariably do, or Diego Gomez is able to shoot from anywhere outside the area, as he often is, and everything is in front of Luka Vuskovic so he doesn’t have to run too far, unless he finds himself in the opposition penalty area, the second-best team in the country will score first before OOPing you into oblivion.
Noni Madueke When the longreads on one of the more clearly and obviously signposted Premier League title wins are published, the succulent Madueke filling in an international break sandwich will provide one of the more compelling chapters.
Mikel Arteta said “the best player in training in the last 10 days” gave “no option” but to start him when the club season resumed in October. Heading into November’s pause for an England squad far less understandably shorn of the Arsenal forward, his manager praised “a different Noni”.
No player has been as influential for the champions in a gruelling run of nine games in 28 days. In the Premier League alone, Madueke has directly contributed to four extra points with the only goal against Nottingham Forest and the shot which forced the breakthrough against Hull.
He was the irrepressible difference against the Tigers: no player had more shots (four) or won more duels (eight); he had at least five more touches in the opposition penalty area than any other player; he completed as many dribbles (six) as everyone else combined.
No-one has created more chances per 90 in the entire division. This is – admittedly on the basis of a month-long sample size – the elite-level, decisive, game-breaking wide forward Arsenal did not sign in the summer. And that infuriating overcomplification of a late chance forged by a stunning team move still points to ample room for improvement.
Madueke’s reaction to his last England snub was to take it upon himself to fly out to Portugal and go from undesirable to undeniable. It’s hard not to feel for whichever defenders happen to be in his way after another fortnight of relentless self-development fuelled by pure hatred for Thomas Tuchel.
David Moyes Say what you want about Moyes – and for the best part of two and a half decades most have – but the fella knows how to sodding profile and platform a goddamn Premier League centre-forward.
Thierno Barry is just the latest in a long line of bafflingly uber-effective line-leaders either repurposed or refined by Moyes when few others were blessed with the requisite vision. The Marko Arnautovic-Michail Antonio-Jarrod Bowen sequence at West Ham will take some beating but Nikica Jelavic and Beto both scored 16 Premier League goals for the Scot despite often seeming to have never encountered a football before.
Barry is two behind them both in the Moyes Premier League top scorer stakes, his Coventry brace taking him past James Beattie and into the orbit of Jermain Defoe and Duncan Ferguson (both 15).
Moyes almost certainly unironically believes Everton would have won the title in his first spell with Barry up front. And the best part is that he probably wouldn’t be wrong.
Rodrigo Muniz A first Premier League goal since the opening game of last season – and a heartbreaking post-match revelation which put those professional struggles into perspective.
“Last season was really difficult for me because, now I can say it, but I had the surgery,” Muniz said after the Newcastle draw. “My wife was pregnant last season and, unfortunately, we lost the baby, but God is good all the time and now she’s pregnant again. The goal was for my baby, and I hope this season will be different than last season.”
It’s a lovely thing; please don’t ruin it, Manchester United.
Jules Ahoka Before this season, Ahoka had played two games of senior-level, professional football. Ninety-eight minutes, to be exact. Ninety of which were as a centre-half.
Since joining Sunderland for £8.6m in August, he has started five matches, scored in the Europa League and now practically made his full Premier League debut, coming on for the club’s captain in the fourth minute against a Chelsea side with a £173m midfield.
Ahoka was man of the match and made the most defensive contributions of any player (14 tackles, interceptions, recoveries, clearances and headed clearances) as Sunderland kept a clean sheet and secured a crucial win for their manager.
The environment is obviously drastically different and far less conducive to the development of such a precocious player, but it is funny that Manchester United spent so much on a grossly mismanaged midfield overhaul when other clubs make the identification of hidden gems look so simple.
Liverpool 18th in a home Premier League table, but top of the away version and the only side still unbeaten on the road. The fear has always been that Anfield is holding them back.
Bournemouth This calendar year alone, Bournemouth have set a new record for the longest unbeaten run in the club’s history, and equalled their best-ever sequence of consecutive wins.
Those coming under different managers is a demonstration of their preposterously good succession planning. And Evanilson’s uncanny knack of forcing individual errors. Bournemouth have scored at least twice as many goals from opposition mistakes as any other team. It’s a dreadful shame they played Manchester City before Marco Rose figured it all out, and don’t face them again until April.
Senne Lammens That wasn’t very Goalkeeper’s Union of you at all.
Premier League losers
Crystal Palace Grow up and stop pretending you’re not going to appoint Roy Hodgson.
Unai Emery A winner in the sense Manchester United will now not touch and thus completely ruin him. Emery and Villa are far better off together than either could be apart.
But Christ, man. In ten trips to Old Trafford with four different teams against five different managers, Emery has led nine different times – 0-1 on four occasions, 1-2 twice, 0-2 twice and 2-4 once – and never won.
Manchester City It does feel like the novelty of dressing up as inflatable bananas to travel 80-odd miles across the country wears off quicker when the new-manager bounce and siege mentality simultaneously subsides to leave a club in transition on the pitch and statis off it.
They haven’t half looked like incompetent strangers of late, which does make sense given the composition of this squad under a new manager. But it must be far less fun to play sh*t while being found guilty of systemic cheating, than it is to just simply keep winning.
Manchester United For two minutes and 46 seconds, they were bottom of the Premier League table. In November. During their tenth game.
Fergie Time is the broken clock which is capable of striking at random intervals, turning defeats in their last two games into a comeback victory and barely fathomable 4-4 draw.
But this is simultaneously guaranteed to be their longest run of consecutive days in the top-flight relegation zone since at least October 1986 – around the time it became patently clear that Ron Atkinson could not continue.
That stage has been reached and long since passed with Michael Carrick, yet he and they persist on the pretence that a few more completely unsustainable stoppage-time goals might point to a turned corner in an infernal maze which has trapped far better managers over the last decade.
Fun.
Rodrigo Bentancur
It was first, foremost and fundamentally a Roberto De Zerbi failure; that should be made explicitly clear from the off.
But it is remarkable just how furiously impotent Bentancur has been for Spurs this season, while still retaining the seemingly infinite faith of a man otherwise notoriously hard to please.
Bentancur has been on the pitch for precisely zero Spurs goals this season, while they have conceded eight with him playing. And it is difficult to nail down the single funniest part of that run:
Starting against Aston Villa and coming off at 3-0 down in the 84th minute, with Spurs scoring twice in the closing stages.
Being sent off at 1-0 down against Manchester United and inadvertently inspiring their comeback.
Missing the next three games through suspension, all of which Spurs won, conceding just once.
Returning with a substitute cameo against Leeds, being introduced at 0-0 in the 65th minute, playing well and then still setting up the winning goal for the opposition.
It might be coincidence, absurd misfortune or an unbreakable ancient curse. But Spurs are considerably and consistently worse for Bentancur’s presence.
Leeds An excellent, entirely deserved and Farke-ing hard-fought win though it was, any long-suffering Leeds supporter will attest that beating Spurs only slightly offsets the continuing frustration at having to watch Tarik Muharemovic.
Dreadful, he is. Completely unsuited to the Premier League. Not cut out for the physicality whatsoever. And apparently he doesn’t even tip.
Muharemovic, the absolute clogger that he is, leads the division for both clearances and headed clearances, both by considerable margins. Leeds will take one for the team and begrudgingly keep him if they must.
Brentford Two red cards for violent conduct in three games is less than ideal. There is more sympathy for Igor Thiago than there was Yehor Yarmoliuk, but both instances betrayed a ridiculous naivety Brentford really should be above at this level by now.
Not since their first Premier League campaign have Brentford incurred as many as three red cards. If they continue to fail to learn the lessons of the last few weeks, that bar will be raised and it will continue to cost them.
Hull
When Hull were last in the Premier League, only four of their 22 defeats were by as little as a single goal. It won’t be much consolation to Sergej Jakirovic as their winless run extends to nine games, but all three of their losses so far being either 1-0 or 2-1 is testament to the Tigers’ organisation, energy levels, resolve and ability to compete.
Whatever happens come the end of the campaign, Hull will not tolerate the sort of battering and beating most had prescribed for them in pre-season.
Brighton next after the international break, is it? Ah.
Newcastle
There are goals in this team – 255 in the Premier League, to be exact, so more than most of the rest of the division.
But that tells a fraction of the story. Just two current Newcastle players have reached double figures for league goals in a single top-flight season: Harvey Barnes for relegated Leicester in 2022/23, and Yoane Wissa in a final two campaigns at Brentford which have proven extraordinarily costly for the Magpies.
Joelinton, third for all-time Premier League goals in this Newcastle squad, has spread 24 over six seasons. Jacob Murphy, the hero against Fulham, has reached 23 in his ninth campaign for them. In fifth is Fabian sodding Schar.
In Newcastle’s last 36 Premier League games, only Will Osula (seven) has outscored Anthony Gordon and Bruno Guimaraes (six). Neither were prolific but a healthy chunk of goals was sold in the summer and in no way offset, despite a summer spend of well over £250m.
Levi Colwill Joins the legion of defenders destined to make the podcast rounds in 20 years, tearily regaling an entirely AI Jake Humphrey about how Brian Brobbey was his toughest opponent.
Colwill’s reputation was enhanced through injury-enforced absence and Enzo Maresca’s crying last season. Such performances do not leave enough of a stain to prohibit links with Barcelona, but they do underline how quickly one apparent solution to Chelsea’s defensive ailments can become part of the problem.
Ipswich Twenty-nine games and counting without a Premier League clean sheet feels sub-optimal. The last team Ipswich kept out in the top flight had Christopher Nkunku up front with Joao Felix in support.
Coventry
Having players with hair and opponents with hands do feel like ridiculous oversights bound to be punished At This Level.