Nick Miller recaps another wild weekend in the Premier League, as Liverpool continued to confound and Scott Parker tried something revolutionary in his team selection.
Confusion of the weekend
Let’s start with the good news. Liverpool are unbeaten in eight league games. Liverpool’s toughest tests to come (games against Chelsea and Spurs) are at home, where they haven’t lost a league game since April 2017. Liverpool have six of their remaining nine games against teams currently in the bottom seven.
Now the bad news. Liverpool have drawn four of their past six in the league. Liverpool’s run-in might very well be straightforward on paper, but when you’ve recently failed to beat Leicester and West Ham, banking the three points becomes more of a stretch. Liverpool have been on top in two local derbies in a week but failed to win either of them.
Throw in Jurgen Klopp blaming the wind and starting an argument with a ball boy after their 0-0 Merseyside draw with Everton, and you begin to paint a picture of a side who are, in the modern parlance, not in a good moment.
Yet they’re only a point off the top of the table with nine games remaining, while Manchester City must travel to Old Trafford and have an extra competition, the FA Cup, to distract them.
More than anything, it must be wildly confusing to be a Liverpool fan: oscillating from joy to despair to hope, the sense that opportunities have been squandered but not completely thrown away, the realisation that things are leaning Manchester City’s way at the moment tempered by the knowledge that they could lean right back at any moment.
As things stand, City are favourites to win the league, but who knows what next weekend could bring?
— Liverpool ratings: Van Dijk a colossus, Salah wasteful
— Ogden: Liverpool still in the title race, but it’s slipping
Team talk of the weekend
For another good news/bad news situation, we head to Wembley. On the bad side, here was a Tottenham team that finished the draw with Arsenal with a midfield pairing of Danny Rose and Moussa Sissoko, a decision Mauricio Pochettino explained afterward was due to nothing more complicated than not having any other choice.
The flip side of that is it again served as emphasis of what extraordinary things Pochettino is doing with the players available to him, this time thanks in part to a half-time team talk that Rose described as “like being sent to war” and “literally one of the best” he has ever heard.
But to swing back to the bad news, for Spurs, greater than the fear of losing him to a richer rival must be that every manager has his limits: At what stage do this squad’s limitations outstrip Pochettino’s coaching ability?
Liability of the weekend
Regardless of whether Harry Kane was offside for the penalty that saved a point for Tottenham, the bigger concern for Arsenal than a marginal decision is, not for the first time, Shkodran Mustafi. What an odd player he is.
Ninety-five percent of the time, he’s a perfectly competent Premier League defender, but then something happens in his head, and he does something entirely bizarre — such as, for example, needlessly barging an opponent over in the penalty area. It’s a bit like having a microwave that works well enough most of the time but explodes when you’re trying to reheat a lasagne.
This summer will be another delicate one for Arsenal in the transfer window, but one of their priorities must be to find a central defender who doesn’t do horrendous things to their fans’ blood pressure.
Sliding doors moment of the weekend
The score was still 0-0 when Kepa Arrizabalaga made an error that almost made the “misunderstanding” at Wembley look small. The Chelsea keeper came out to claim a regulation cross under vague challenge from Ryan Babel but promptly dropped it right in front of the Fulham forward.
Fortunately for Kepa, Maurizio Sarri, Chelsea and anyone who dislikes “narrative” in football, Babel wasn’t quite paying attention. The ball hit his back, and by the time he fully realised what was happening, Kepa had recovered.
Just imagine if Babel had scored and Fulham had won, considering that Kepa was just back in the team after his Carabao Cup indiscretion. Imagine the despair. Imagine the headlines. Imagine the smoke coming out of Sarri’s ears. Kepa might have simply walked out of Craven Cottage, turned left, hailed a taxi to Heathrow airport and hopped on the next flight to Bilbao, never to return.
Reserve of the weekend
Riyad Mahrez‘s goal against Bournemouth might turn out to be more valuable than simply being one that gained Manchester City three points. The injuries to Kevin de Bruyne and John Stones served as emphasis that Pep Guardiola will need his “second-string” players as much as possible for these breakneck last nine games of the season.
Mahrez is one of those players but is one who hasn’t yet lived up to the standards expected of City. However, if Mahrez can keep contributing match-winning moments, some disappointing performances in the first three-quarters of the season will be forgotten.
Initiative taker of the weekend
“Now, it’s not that I feel like it’s going to be my day. I have to make it my day.”
You can’t really blame most players for filling their postmatch interviews with bland platitudes, but it was nice that, when asked by the BBC whether the fates were conspiring against him, and it wasn’t “going to be his day,” Wilf Zaha eschewed a bland answer with insight into the mental processes that make such a brilliant player as him.
MacGyver of the weekend
Whatever magic Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is sprinkling over this Manchester United side, he’s managing more and more impressive feats every week. At the moment, it’s the skill of improvisation, with the number of injuries suffered by his players meaning he has to MacGyver a functioning team using whatever players remain standing.
Like most tasks presented to him since his appointment in December, he’s doing it. Marcus Rashford‘s return to the team was balanced out by Alexis Sanchez‘s injury, meaning Solskjaer will have to come up with something else for the second-leg of their Champions League tie against PSG. Oh, and remember Paul Pogba is suspended for that one, too.
If he can figure out a way of overturning the 2-0 deficit with this number of absences, never mind giving him the permanent job. Give some statue-makers a call.
Simple call of the weekend
Scott Parker was a pretty straightforward player, and on early evidence, he’s going to be a straightforward manager.
His first-team selection as Fulham manager featured the revolutionary tactic of picking players in the positions they’re most comfortable, most notably Tom Cairney in his favoured No. 10 role, where Claudio Ranieri usually didn’t play him. As a result, Cairney was probably the best player on the pitch, and Fulham went extremely close to nicking a point against Chelsea. Straightforward game, football.
Goal of the weekend
There were many more impressive and spectacular strikes this weekend, but probably the most valuable and definitely the one greeted with the most relief was Florin Andone‘s late header for Brighton against Huddersfield.
Had the Seagulls not won that game, it would have been eight games without a win and the bottom three rapidly approaching. Trouble still looms, but at least they can breathe a little more easily.
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