Manchester City are leaking goals, Crystal Palace are not scoring enough and David Moyes has a quandaryThe teams that came second and third in last season’s Championship –and now sit in the form table’s bottom four – meet in what looks a seriously important encounter. Brentford go into it without Ivan Toney, who has tested positive for Covid, and Sergi Canós, suspended after getting a fifth booking of the season for taking off his shirt when celebrating a goal against Leeds last weekend. Watford also have significant injuries, most notably to the winger Ismaïla Sarr, and after a run of encouraging performances in extremely difficult fixtures must seize the opportunity presented by their next few games to haul themselves away...
Next few weeks could shape season’s destiny and right now Liverpool look bang in form while Chelsea cannot find fluidityIt is clear there is a three-horse race for the Premier League title as we enter a crucial phase that could have a huge influence on where the trophy ends up. The games are coming thick and fast and the side that navigate the next month most smoothly could make themselves frontrunners.The three teams have very different styles, which makes it a more exciting battle. Manchester City are the side I would pay to watch because of their buildup and team play. Opponents know what City are going to do but are usually unable to stop them thanks to the bewildering...
The challenge to the top three has enlivened the season – but their positive goal difference suggests the gap remains glaringOn the face of it, a little over a third of the way through, this feels like a pretty good Premier League season – at least from a football point of view. There is the possibility of a three-way title fight. The only side that look as though they could be cut adrift have just been taken over by owners who can be expected to spend heavily in January. There are intriguing stories everywhere, from Manchester United’s struggles to the returns of Antonio Conte, Steven Gerrard and Patrick Vieira.The arrival of Ralf Rangnick at Old Trafford adds to the richness...
West Ham’s victory was richly deserved and deepened the sense that Chelsea need to refresh their approach a littleIs this a glitch? Is the system experiencing an outage? It is a temptation that is best resisted, the urge to talk about this Chelsea team as a piece of fine-point engineering, to style Thomas Tuchel as a pure systems man, poring over his data charts, banging his dials, reconfiguring the flux capacitor with a bent hairpin.But still, something is happening here. A 3-2 defeat by an excellent West Ham at the London Stadium leaves Chelsea with two wins in their last five games, their lead at the top of the table dissipated, with a sense of the same kind of drag...
Manchester United’s new interim manager would have been watching closely as his soon-to-be players did their auditions at Stamford BridgeAs Cristiano Ronaldo prepared to come on to the pitch with an hour gone at Stamford Bridge, having already performed a dutiful kind of warm-up, idling along the touchline like a venerable old don taking a stroll on the chamomile lawns, a large book of laminated diagrams was waved in front of his nose.Ronaldo, to his credit, made a decent show of having a look. Two decades into one of the great elite level careers, CR7 is not too proud for your diagrams. But there might have been a temptation to grab that folder and scour the hand written notes, to...