Premier League Winners and Losers accepts winning 6-2 is quite good and has views on Man Utd
Chelsea get some grudging credit where it’s due after that faintly ludicrous demolition job on Wolves, while the other half of Winners and Losers contains, inevitably, a great deal of Manchester United and Everton.
Winners
Chelsea
We could get into the specifics. We could point at xG figures that are somewhere close to an exact inversion of a lot of Chelsea games from last season, this time yielding six goals from 1.4 and we could even uncharitably if accurately note that Wolves do appear to be quite alarmingly sh*t on the early evidence of this season.
But come on. Chelsea have had a lot of stick in recent days and have deserved absolutely all of it. There will be more flak in their future. For now let’s at least try and be gracious in our praise of an astonishing morale-boosting win that was as unlikely as it was necessary. For a glorious 90-minute period, all their problems could be forgotten.
Spent the GDP of a small nation on your squad and forgotten to have a striker in there? Simply have one of the many spare parts you’ve acquired score a second-half hat-trick. Todd Boehly, you evil genius, you’ve done it again.
Cole Palmer is very much not a spare part and is already doing enough to dispel any rogue one-season wonder talk as he takes full control of Chelsea’s attacking output. Mauricio Pochettino wouldn’t have lasted the season without Palmer and if nothing else he has once again taken a huge pile of pressure off another Chelsea manager for the time being at least.
With a seemingly crap-again Crystal Palace to come next week, Chelsea now have a large and unexpected chance to go into the international break the focus of nobody’s attention. That’s a huge win for a club and an experiment absolutely everyone else is desperate to see crash and burn.
Cole Palmer and Noni Madueke
The fifth time in Premier League history that one player has assisted all three goals of a team-mate’s hat-trick, and it took Palmer and Madueke just 14 minutes to do the whole lot. That’s a full five minutes faster than Harry Kane and Son Heung-min’s lazy effort against Southampton four years ago, although Kane did go on to assist Son a fourth time in that game, so still some work for Palmer and Madueke to do there.
Enzo Maresca
A pleasant discovery in his second game as a top-flight manager that not everybody is Manchester City.
Arsenal
A statement win that avenged one of their few notable setbacks last season at Villa and also showed a side maturing to cope better with the sort of atmosphere that derailed them in last season’s wild game at Newcastle.
As Matt Stead noted, Arsenal have evolved again and Sir Alex Ferguson should be worried.
David Raya
But for all the rightful praise Arsenal will get for riding the wave at Villa and emerging impressive winners it could all have looked so very different without Raya’s vital, granite-wristed save from Ollie Watkins at what would turn out to be the most crucial time imaginable.
It came during Villa’s very best spell of the match early in the second half and just minutes before Leandro Trossard so clinically gave Arsenal a lead they never subsequently looked like surrendering.
Feels like a significant moment for Raya. His critics are long since answered, but it still felt until now like his increasingly and reliably impressive efforts in the Arsenal goal lacked that truly memorable pivotal moment of greatness. Absolutely nobody doubts his credentials now, but as a keeper it still must be a lovely thing to have that specific moment that you know has played a massive part in altering the course of a vital game.
Liverpool
Slightly by accident but largely we think by design, Arne Slot’s plan at Liverpool appears to be leaning into what made Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool so good. It seems a pretty solid strategy.
Their two wins have come, in truth, from games in which anything less would be considered failure but there’s been a calm authority to them that offers encouragement for what we’re trying desperately hard to avoid calling the Slot Machine might end up looking like.
It’s very (very) early in the season but next week’s trip to Old Trafford already looks like a pretty significant bellwether fixture for the season as a whole. And whatever happens, should at least sustain us all through at least the first few days of the excruciatingly early interlull that follows. A heartfelt thank you to our fixture computer overlords.
Mo Salah
Two goals and an assist already this season for Salah, still Liverpool’s most important player and proving every bit as successful in turning back time’s relentless march on the pitch as he has been with his hairline.
Erling Haaland
His seventh Premier League hat-trick in his 68th game. It’s not normal behaviour, is it? It’s as many as Wayne Rooney. It’s more than Cristiano Ronaldo and Jamie Vardy combined. It’s three more than either Mo Salah or Son Heung-min.
Only Sergio Aguero, Alan Shearer, Robbie Fowler, Thierry Henry, Harry Kane and Michael Owen have scored more of them in the Premier League, and at Haaland’s current absurd rate of one every 10 games he’ll reel in all but Aguero and Shearer before this season – his third – is through.
Manchester City
Going 1-0 down at home to Ipswich was a bit of a shock. Being 3-1 up before there were 20 minutes on the clock was not.
Brighton
If only the entire season could be played in August and September. Saturday’s late but deserved win over Manchester United made it seven wins from their last nine games played in late summer.
It’s the same number of games they won in the 31 they played between October and May last season.
The focus may, inevitably, have fallen on United because it was ever thus but that’s now two pretty significant statement wins from Fabian Hurzeler’s side to kick off their latest rebirth.
Tottenham
Needed a convincing retort to Monday night’s disappointment at Leicester and couldn’t have asked for much more than an Everton side missing Jarrad Branthwaite and any senior option at right-back.
They delivered, though, thumping Everton 4-0 with a display full of predictable attacking brio and verve but also the requisite solidity on the rare occasions it was required.
Slapping a half-strength Everton silly tells us nothing much about Tottenham’s season-long prospects and they remain in urgent need of a statement win over someone actually good after the way last season finished with five defeats in the last seven games to teams they would like to consider their peers, but they did all that was necessary here.
It will get inevitably swallowed up by whatever goes down between Manchester United and Liverpool, but Spurs’ trip to Newcastle – where they have been humiliated on their last two trips – feels just as significant a game for the season prospects of both the two teams involved and those who might be in direct competition with them for the minor places.
Son Heung-min
Probably what spurred him on. Might just be a significant sliding doors moment in the season. We’ll never know now whether Son would have started had Dominic Solanke been available, because it was pretty clear why Ange Postecoglou wanted to unleash Wilson Odobert to attack Everton’s weak right flank.
Switched to a central role, Son picked Jordan Pickford’s pocket for his first goal and then scored a second having moved back out to the left-side role in which he was so anonymous at Leicester. In so doing he doubled his goal tally for the last 10 games and confirmed talk of his demise may just have been exaggerated. Ahem.
Tottenham’s centre-backs
Cristian Romero marked his 100th Tottenham game with his seventh goal for the club via a typically thunderous header. Notably, it’s a sixth goal in 35 Premier League appearances under Postecoglou having managed just one in his previous 49. Only Son, Richarlison and Dejan Kulusevski match or better Romero’s Premier League Angeball tally.
Micky van de Ven, meanwhile, created Son’s second goal with a rampaging 80-yard run from the edge of one box to the other. Haters will note he simply ran very fast in a straight line, but that’s kind of the point; we can’t think of another centre-back who could run 80 yards like that without challenge as pursuers trail in his wake.
But better even than the goal and lung-busting assist? An actual clean sheet. Far more of a surprise, that.
West Ham
Opening-day defeat to Aston Villa sapped a fair bit of the optimism that had been bubbling up during an eye-catching summer of business in east London, so Saturday’s victory over a suddenly stuttering Crystal Palace felt significant and necessary given the identity of next weekend’s visitors to the London Stadium.
You don’t really want a pre-season so full of optimism to turn into actual season where you hit the first international break without a win.
Nottingham Forest
Handed a fixture list that looked like it could give them the kind of running start that can make all the difference in what looks likely to be another relegation battle, and four points from two games with a thoroughly downtrodden Wolves to come next week is the very ideal kind of thing.
Fulham
One win, one defeat. Operation: Mid-table is up and running once more.
Losers
Everton
Impossible to resist The Fear after a start to the season that now reads played two, lost two, scored none and conceded seven. It’s a worse start than Ipswich, and Ipswich have had to play Liverpool and Man City.
Everton can and must point to their own misfortunes. They could even argue their fixture list is harsher still, given that they have been required to play Brighton and Spurs at what the evidence of last season and this suggests is the worst possible time to play Brighton and Spurs.
They’ve also been given a glimpse of what a post-Jarrad Branthwaite reality might look like and, sure enough, it turns out that it looks absolutely horrific thank you very much. Not sure any of us really needed that theoretical scenario painted so vividly in the real world to be honest, but sometimes it’s good to have your suspicions confirmed.
We’re still pretty sure that when the long stagger unwinds over a course of the season that there remain comfortably more than three teams worse than Sean Dyche’s side, but we’re no longer as confident of that as we were a fortnight ago.
And there is simply no escaping the intrusive thoughts now shouting very loudly indeed about the way grimly clinging on to top-flight status for as long as Everton have only to get relegated and beginning life in their spanking new stadium in the second tier would be the most Everton thing imaginable.
Manchester United
Got lucky against Fulham. Did not get lucky against Brighton. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth, with seasons and managers written off in the Mailbox and much to ponder after a miserable performance.
That they might have got away with it were it not for one of the unluckier offside goals you’re likely to see must not detract from the general poverty of United’s play. They have been this bad far too often in the last year and still the starkest thing about them remains not that they finished eighth last season and have made an unconvincing start to this but that they are damn lucky it isn’t worse.
The sheer number and scale of the fundamental defensive errors they make is so jarring for what nominally remains a top club and high-level manager.
Joshua Zirkzee
In the right place at the right time against Fulham, and in the wrong place at the wrong time against Brighton. A rollercoaster start to his Manchester United career.
Jordan Pickford
It’s not really a great thing for a goalkeeper to have a signature ‘mea culpa’ gesture, is it?
Wolves
A 2-0 loss away at Arsenal wasn’t an ideal start to the season, but nor was it disastrous. Easily dismissed as the sort of thing that can and will happen to teams higher and lower in the food chain than Wolves.
But losing 6-2 at home to Chelsea? This Chelsea? Chaos and bin-fire Chelsea? Yeah, that does now tip this start towards ‘worrying’. Nottingham Forest away next weekend now becomes a far bigger early-season indicator than would be considered ideal, especially given a harrowing fixture list that pits Gary O’Neil’s side against Newcastle, Villa, Liverpool and Man City in four of their next five after that.
We feared for them last season, we really did, and it turned out we needn’t have worried at all. It’s possible we were exactly right, with the tiny mistake of simply being out by one calendar year. It’s basically Casemiro all over again.
Ollie Watkins
Very early in the season to be having significant turning points, but his failure to put Aston Villa ahead when they were on top against Arsenal really does feel like one. Not least because of the wounds from last season which Watkins and Villa were almost uniquely placed to reopen on an increasingly fearsome Arsenal.
Ipswich
Learned the hard way that taking a seventh-minute lead at Manchester City is the sort of impertinence that will be severely and swiftly dealt with. The good news for Ipswich, having faced Liverpool and City thus far, is that not all the Premier League is like this. A lot of it is often really quite sh*t.
Crystal Palace
We fell for it too. The thrilling, freewheeling end to last season had us fooled. We genuinely, honestly thought Crystal Palace would get 50 points this season, and probably quite easily.
A lesson duly learned. Forty-something it shall be.
Bournemouth
Technically have given us the need for a new section called ‘Drawers’ which doesn’t really work because it just looks like it says drawers, doesn’t it? Unbeaten is good, but not so much when winless is equally accurate and even more so when you have a potential injury-time winner chalked off by VAR at its most unpleasantly joyless and unjustifiably self-assured.
Southampton
A second consecutive 1-0 defeat on their return to the Premier League is no disaster and points at least to a team competing, but Nottingham Forest at home very much had the look of one of the very earliest six-pointers ever served up by the Barclays fixture computer and the outcome a result the Saints may well rue in the months to come.
Leicester
But they’ve still got one more point than the other promoted clubs combined. Would probably take their current 15th at the end of the season, all things considered.
The word ‘factual’
The latest innocent victim in the march of VAR doublespeak.