One of football’s great lies is that success is cyclical and that if you are big enough and wait long enough you will sooner or later be back at the topEverywhere you turned, there were the memories. In the tunnel, there was Roy Keane telling Patrick Vieira he’d see him out there. By the touchline there was Gary Neville kicking José Antonio Reyes. Just outside the penalty area, there was Martin Keown jostling Ruud van Nistelrooy. Remember? Remember how every man knew when we reached out to claim the throne? Remember when we were kings?Those pre-Abramovich days when this was the biggest game in English football seem a long time ago now, two decades gone with atrocious haste. Manchester United...
Solskjær’s diplomacy masks United problems, De Bruyne in the ascendancy and Xhaka’s poor form gives Emery a tough choiceThe Dozen: our pick of the weekend’s best picturesUnai Emery is yet to find the right balance for his midfield but the claim of his de facto captain, Granit Xhaka, to be part of it is looking decidedly tenuous. First things first: the Switzerland international is a good player who cares tremendously and does not deserve anything like the negative reception he received upon his substitution against Aston Villa after 72 minutes. But his replacements, Lucas Torreira and the outstanding youngster Joe Willock, helped turbo-charge Arsenal’s comeback while Matteo Guendouzi played the second half like a man possessed. Xhaka, by contrast, looked...
Sokratis Papastathopoulos’s blunder against Watford is part of a recent trend that will have many sides questioning whether the adoption of this high-risk strategy is worth itL ast Sunday, when the Arsenal defender Sokratis Papastathopoulos attempted to pass the ball from inside his own penalty area to Mattéo Guendouzi just outside it and in doing so gifted Watford a goal that allowed them back into the game, he joined a recent trend. Everybody wants to play out from the back, but in the past few months doing so has proved exceptionally risky: John Stones against the Netherlands, Plamen Iliev for Bulgaria against England, Michael Keane against Kosovo, Nicolás Otamendi against Norwich – the list of those who have given goals...
Buendía the architect of City’s bad day, Arsenal were woeful in defence and Maguire deserved better from Leicester fansThe Dozen: our pick of the weekend’s best picturesThe way in which Norwich turned a negative into a positive was quite something. With nigh-on a full team of players out injured, the odds of stopping Manchester City looked insurmountable. Instead Daniel Farke’s men gave their best performance of the season by far, not only cutting the champions open but looking solid at the back for the first time. There was kudos for the debutants in defence, Sam Byram and Ibrahim Amadou, but also for more seasoned Norwich players. Emi Buendía and Marco Stiepermann were central to a buccaneering style in the Championship...
After showing great resilience to earn a draw against Arsenal, having been two goals down, the faithful were more than happy to see the return of a familiar faceIs it still called a “new manager bounce” when the manager is not particularly new? Whatever this was, it had Vicarage Road feeling far better about things and Watford looking considerably more akin to their old selves. From the jaws of defeat came what, on the basis of a ferocious assault on Arsenal’s goal in the second half, felt by the end like a 2-2 thrashing. Quique Sánchez Flores came back for afternoons like this and the home support, numbed by the atrophy of late-era Javi Gracia, would happily get used to...