We’ll understand if you just want to scroll straight down to the losers bit and Manchester United getting another thorough kicking, but there’s praise too for Spurs and at least some acknowledgement that other games also happened.
Winners
Tottenham
Even as we watched Tottenham tear what nominally passed for Manchester United’s defence apart again and again, seemingly at will, we knew what was going to happen. We knew we and everyone else were about to get pelters for failing to give Spurs credit and focusing on how bad United were.
But United really were staggeringly bad. It’s instructive to glance down the league table and see how long it takes to get to a team you don’t think would’ve beaten that United performance. Pretty sure at least two of the sides with no wins from six games could’ve sorted that out here.
We’re doing it again, look. This is the third paragraph about Spurs and it’s still all about United. Partly that’s because, as always, This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About, but also because it really did feel like this was a day that was far more about United being bad than Spurs being good. This time, it’s not just #numbers to be focusing on Ten Hag’s job prospects in the wake of what we’ve just seen.
However. Yes, Spurs were also very good. That United were unbelievably callow in allowing them to look quite so good shouldn’t detract entirely from a second successive display of impressive competence from Ange Postecoglou’s side.
This was a statement win for several reasons, and an indicator of – at the very least – a season and project back on track after threatening to come off the rails completely.
There has been a clear response to the North London Derby, and had to be. Spurs are looking a quicker and more direct attacking team and while they still lack that one consistent, reliable finisher that could truly elevate them they do now at least have the look of a team that will carve out enough chances for that to matter less often.
They are so much better going forward when they try to do so with speed, taking advantage of the technical gifts and quickness of thought their frontline can boast.
Sure, not every defence they come up against will be as generous as United’s, but nor will they be as stubborn as Arsenal’s. When Spurs’ attacking shapes and patterns look like this and happen at this pace, they look a completely different beast. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen it in back-to-back league games.
It’s only the second time this year Spurs have won two Premier League games in a row, and unsurprisingly also the first time since wins over Palace and Villa in March that they’ve scored three goals two games running.
This was also Spurs’ first win against ‘big eight’ opposition since that Villa game, since when their record in these games had read played seven, lost seven.
So yes, the focus may inevitably be on how bad United were, but Spurs were also good. And find themselves looking upward again in a way that seemed unlikely after the NLD a few short weeks ago. It’s been four wins from four since then in all competitions; we already find ourselves idly wondering just how important those last few minutes of vintage Carabao at Coventry might prove in the final reckoning.
It may not matter much in that particular competition with City to come next, but the change in mood triggered by that late comeback feels mighty significant. Angeball may still ultimately fail, but its demise felt literally minutes away at Coventry. No longer.
Dejan Kulusevski
It’s been a thought fluttering around our head for a few weeks now but this week has confirmed it. Dejan Kulusevski is Tottenham’s best player and we’re really not quite sure what to think about that.
He’s a player we like an awful lot, a clever player with a deceptive turn of foot and all manner of neat touches in a strong frame. But he just doesn’t necessarily strike one as the sort who should be the best player at an elite club.
Increasingly, though, we come round to the view that this is our issue not his or Spurs’. He was brilliant again at United, as he has been most every time we’ve seen him this season – and in a variety of positions across Spurs’ midfield and attack – and the fact this latest eye-catcher came in a game where the more obvious headliner Son Heung-min was absent also felt like a shifting of the sands.
Kulusevski for player of the year, is what we’re saying here. Surrender to your ginger Swedish overlord.
Brennan Johnson
Has now scored in each of his last four games, all of them wins, since some bad bells led him to bin off the socials after the Arsenal defeat.
It’s a hell of an argument for quitting Insta.
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Arsenal
A draw would have been both disastrous and ludicrous. The nature of Arsenal’s task in trying to outlast Manchester City across an entire Premier League season is well known, and we’ve all said time and again how little margin for error it all leaves.
What Saturday so nearly demonstrated was how little margin it leaves for football deciding to just be a mad bastard every now and then. A game Arsenal had already seemingly won once and could absolutely have won by five or six came desperately, improbably close to ending in a 2-2 draw.
Yes, there was the tiniest air of complacency about Arsenal at 2-0 up, but also come on: you simply cannot keep 100 per cent intensity at all times without losing the absolute run of yourselves. A criticism of Arsenal’s first title tilt was just how much nervous energy they expended on it all. If you’re ever going to let up a little bit, it’s when 2-0 up at home to Leicester. And it still took two freakish goals from Leicester’s right-back to expose that tiny drop in standards.
Arsenal, though, as they so often do these days, mustered one of their trademark big celebration-police-bothering finishes and ended the game with a scoreline that at least offered some nod to the overall balance of play.
And as ever, while this might not be the way anyone ever actually plans to win a game it absolutely is the best one when it happens. It’s invigorating no matter the opposition, which – along with the aforementioned margin of error (or lack thereof) – is one of the key points the joyless Celebration Police either don’t understand or more accurately overlook. There’s no such thing as ‘Only Leicester’ when you are moments away from an infuriatingly costly failure to take advantage of City’s far more forgivable blip at Newcastlle.
Leandro Trossard
Allowing the scorer of Arsenal’s surprisingly important second goal and the man behind the third to serve his one-match suspension in the Carabao a costly oversight from The Conspiracy. Must do better, lads.
Ethan Nwaneri
That his manager was so willing to trust him with a late rescue mission in a must-win game is testament enough to the youngster’s standing at Arsenal. That he so thoroughly justified that faith while remaining stubbornly 17 years of age is ridiculous.
Chelsea
All going really quite staggeringly well, all things considered. That extraordinary first half against Brighton ensured it’s now four wins and a draw from the last five games since starting the season with defeat to Man City, and they are a side playing with unexpected verve and brio under a manager whose alarmingly slight CV offered few hints towards.
Of course, it helps when you have…
Cole Palmer
Second-season syndrome, is it? Four goals before half-time and there’s a decent case that it wasn’t even the best thing he did in the game after that absurd should-have-been-an-assist when all the goalscoring was done with.
It was a performance to vault him to second in the Premier League goalscoring charts for the season, which amounts to being the leading scorer among regular mortals.
However, we may never recover from the mathematically obvious yet nevertheless entirely alarming news that Palmer was too young to have watched Dennis Bergkamp.
Ipswich
The best winless six-game start to a Premier League season on record? Until someone steers us differently in the comments, we’re saying yes. Defeats to Liverpool and Man City are of no real consequence, while since then they’ve battled and played their way to draw against Fulham, Brighton, Southampton and most recently and impressively Aston Villa.
With West Ham, Everton and Leicester all to come around the October international break it seems certain that wait for a win ends relatively soon. And in the unlikely event they do make it as far as the November lull without a win, then they need not worry: they’ve got Man United straight after it.
Liam Delap
Have City f***ed up again? First Palmer, and now this. Two goals for Delap against Villa, with the second a thing of absolute beauty.
He may never get to be a Barclaysmen like his dad, but there’s every indication he has a bright future ahead of him in Our League.
It’s also a very good time indeed to be a young English striker scoring goals in the Premier League. The England ladder is very much there to be climbed.
Everton
Finally.
Bryan Mbeumo
Only Erling Haaland and Palmer have more Premier League goals than Mbeumo this season, and that means for now we remain just about in ‘Ivan who?’ territory for another few weeks before things take what is, alas, the inevitable turn toward which Big Club decides it wants him in January please and thank you.
Liverpool
Really quite striking that a club of Liverpool’s stature and standing can go top of the league and it feel like such a footnote to the weekend as a whole. Couple of reasons, we think. For one they recorded an expected win with only minor levels of fuss, which was unusual in itself this weekend. There’s also the fact that for now there is still a probably fair consensus that the title is a two-horse race and Liverpool ending up best of the rest would surprise literally nobody.
It’s also been just about the gentlest impressive start it’s possible for a team to make. Even the one obviously eye-catching result in their league campaign this season – a 3-0 win at Old Trafford – has now been slightly diluted by the discovery that even Spurs can do that.
None of this is criticism, just observation. Liverpool have had a measurably easy start to the season. The only ‘big eight’ team they’ve faced in the league is the one transparently in crisis and with Bologna and Crystal Palace to round out their work before the international break that won’t change much either.
You can only beat what’s in front of you, of course, and with one jolting exception that’s what Arne Slot’s side have done. They also largely pass the sniff test; this feels like a team that actually is pretty good and just happens to have had a friendly run of games rather than a team looking deceptively good because of that.
But we still don’t really know. By the next international break – when Slot has faced (among others) Chelsea, Arsenal, Brighton, Leverkusen and Aston Villa – we should have a clearer idea of whether we’re looking at a potential title contender or a best-of-the-rest straggler.
Raul Jimenez and Adama Traore
Not exactly Barclaysmen vintage, sure, but still a quite wonderful and unexpected sight to see this pair of old Wolves tearing it up together for Fulham in big 2024.
Losers
Manchester United
They’ve been given quite a kicking elsewhere already, sure, but let’s row in with about another thousand words on just how sh*tbone awful that was.
It’s a miserable, wretched performance. Any team that beats United will always have the grumble that focus inevitably falls on United losing rather than their efforts in winning, but rarely has that felt more appropriate than here. Spurs did the necessary and fair play to them for doing it with – finishing touches aside – a fair amount of flourish, but it really is hard to imagine which Premier League team might fail to have sorted out that miserable excuse for a Manchester United performance.
It’s not just that it was bad – although it absolutely was very, very bad – but that it was also cravenly stupid. While we’re pretty sure most teams would’ve beaten United yesterday, we’re also sure there aren’t many teams for whom such an effort could have played so thoroughly into their hands as Tottenham.
Confidence is still fragile at Spurs, but they do not lack for clever attacking players – or defensive ones eager to join the attacks – who enjoy having space in which to operate. Everyone in the league knows this now, and all but one of those teams endeavour to shut down and minimise that space.
We are absolutely certain that no other team in the league, for instance, would be startled to discover in September 2024 that Micky van de Ven is quite quick. United are the first team in over six months to be visibly rattled by the idea of Tottenham’s full-backs turning up in midfield quite a bit. It’s just staggering idiocy at this point.
And while the defensive disasterclass and abdication of responsibility across the midfield were the most abject elements of United’s display, let’s not overlook the paucity of their attacking play against what remains a distinctly get-atable Tottenham defence on the few times United mustered some response to the waves of Tottenham attacks.
Only at two goals and a man down did United find any kind of coherent thought or plan, by which point it was already too late. That this brief rally ended with Spurs adding a third goal and absolutely nobody on either side being surprised by that is a staggering turn of events. Lads, it’s Man United.
They’ve been bad before and not been great for ages. But while there have been heavier and more overtly humiliating days – even against these opponents – during the wilderness years, it’s hard to recall one where everything has been so bad, where redeeming bright spots or silver linings are so vanishingly difficult to spot.
This felt like a day that highlighted absolutely everything wrong with this club on and off the field, and also just how long it might take to put it all right.
Because here’s perhaps the very worst thing among all the very bad things. That however much this felt like a grimly horrifying new low for United, in no way does it feel like things can only get better. Surely the most terrifying thought of all for United fans after that is the notion that it not only can but very likely will somehow get even worse.
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Erik ten Hag
Not one of his players helped him out, sure, but so much of this has to be on a manager already up to his neck in sh*t.
There are only two possibilities here: either Ten Hag sent his team out with a gameplan that played entirely into their opponent’s hands, or he didn’t do that but the players served that up anyway. For Ten Hag, it doesn’t really matter which because in either case he’s cooked.
Either his tactics or messaging are unforgivably bad, and it’s impossible now to see how he possibly survives all of this long-term. All that has kept him in the job this long is the already dubious idea that it was more embarrassing for United’s bosses to get rid of him than to keep him, and the absolute tipping point for that must surely be approaching if not already passed.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe
All billionaires are, by definition, frauds. Absolutely no billionaire has got there on merit, because it’s an absurd concept on its own terms.
But Ratcliffe is currently mighty fortunate to occupy only a distant second spot among 2024’s Most Fraudulent Billionaires.
It’s been misstep after misstep for a man who had the easiest of tasks when he rocked up thanks to the vast goodwill he carried simply by being neither the Glazers nor Qatar. Those two things he isn’t were enough – and pretty understandably so – for a large swathe of United fans to fall in behind him.
He’s rewarded that support with nonsense upon nonsense.
We have little sympathy for Ten Hag, a manager making countless mistakes and deeply fortunate to remain in the job; but he has also been so spectacularly undermined that if it wasn’t for the rest of the incompetence swirling around this club you might mistake it for Machiavellian subterfuge.
The whole summer process of speaking to other candidates about his job ended in the most drawn-out and least convincing vote of confidence ever issued.
Even the transfer business has appeared designed to stitch the manager up, amounting to almost killing him with kindness. United had an objectively impressive transfer window, but the players they signed are long-term assets who will take time, and that was a luxury Ten Hag simply didn’t have entering the third year of this project so firmly on the back foot.
Almost everything Ratcliffe has done since arriving at United has read like the work of one of those cartoonishly bad jumped-up little bosses you hear about on those ‘world’s worst boss’ posts. You know the ones – the bosses who conveniently but inexplicably conduct all their worst bellendery via WhatsApp. Moaning about tidiness, demonising working from home. The kind of bullsh*t that does nothing to make a tangible difference but allows Ratcliffe to feel important.
Yet there was a queue of people desperate to tell us that this was just the sort of ruthlessness United had lacked and so desperately needed. But here we are, two wasted months into a wasted season, and even that highly questionable line of defence lies in ruins when Ruthless Ratcliffe has so demonstrably bottled the biggest decision of his United tenure by failing to sack an underperforming manager because he happened to win one game.
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Bruno Fernandes
The red may have been a touch harsh for a yellow-plus offence, but only a touch. Bruno slipped before making the tackle and then lunged in anyway; it was the definition of reckless and out of control, and if players don’t know by now that those are key watchwords this season then they absolutely should.
Arguably of more pressing concern than a one-off brainfart that meant United – already struggling with 11 – had almost no chance of a fightback against Spurs is the overall form of United’s talisman this season.
On another day he might have got away with this moment of alarming daftness, but a moment of alarming daftness it would have remained. Bruno has no goals and only one assist in the Premier League this season, and while he has often appeared frustrated at his team-mates he is now starting to look pretty pissed off with himself.
He is not the biggest problem at United by any stretch, but there are worrying signs that a player who has worked so hard in recent years trying to drag United up to his level might just be flailing now and sinking back to theirs.
Brighton
The obvious if probably misplaced concern is that we’re simply looking at a repeat of last season but played in dramatic fast forward. Brighton won five of their first six last campaign before things went tits skywards.
This time a pair of opening wins and a highly commendable draw at Arsenal have been followed by less encouraging stalemates against Ipswich and Forest followed by a naïve-looking thumping at Chelsea.
A few weeks ago, a home game with Spurs would’ve looked like something to relish, but both sides’ efforts this week have given that fixture a very different looking complexion now.
Fabian Hurzeler
That Tottenham clash can now be catchily dubbed the Maintaining A Catastrophically High Defensive Line Against Chelsea Despite Overwhelming Evidence It’s Not Really Working Derby, at least. If Hurzeler sticks to his principles as rigidly as Ange, then that game next week could be utterly magnificent. We genuinely can’t wait to see which side wins 6-4.
Nottingham Forest
Would probably have taken a first defeat of the Premier League season not arriving until the last weekend of September, but the manner of it remains galling in a toothless home defeat to Fulham.
Manchester City
Such are the standards that dropped points in successive games represents something of a crisis at City after another unconvincing display. Still need to go some from here, though, to snatch true crisis-club status off their cross-city rivals. But it will be quite something if they can pull it off. Far more interesting than a fifth title in a row, anyway.
Crystal Palace
Hmm. You wouldn’t want to get too gloomy about it too soon, especially as there have been enough encouraging signs in enough games – draws against Chelsea and United, for instance – but no wins and just three points six games in makes it a vexing start now for a Palace side that finished last season so wonderfully. Five goals in six games tells a story for a team that has been shorn of much of the attacking guile that made last season’s fast finish possible.
Aston Villa
You know you’ve really made it as big-time Barclays when away draws get you in the losers section, but failing to close out a 2-1 lead at Ipswich is an irritating outcome for a side presented with the opportunity to go level on points with the league leaders.
Wolves
And the opposite is true when home defeats almost escape mention. Losing only narrowly to Liverpool while events elsewhere ensured none of the focus rests on the first team to reach five defeats this season can probably be viewed as a reasonable weekend’s work for Wolves.
But Gary O’Neil surely needs something tangible at Brentford next weekend to avoid an extremely uncomfortable international break.
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