Manchester City are peaking at the right time, Brentford risk their season petering out and Spurs live in the land of uncertaintyAfter Manchester City’s 3-0 humbling of Bayern Munich, next up at the Etihad is the Premier League’s second-bottom team, Leicester. This will be the champions’ last league game before a seismic clash with Arsenal on 26 April. Pep Guardiola’s men are in ripe form just as the treble roves into sight, with next Wednesday’s return at Bayern in the Champions League coming three days before a Wembley trip to take on Sheffield United in the FA Cup semi-finals. Erling Haaland is adding assists to his goal-gluttony, Bernardo Silva’s dancing feet are back, and Rúben Dias is a colossus in...
Goalkeeper makes sure his side leave Anfield with a point as he showed his full array of incredible skills to deny LiverpoolWhen the season-crowning montages are spliced into shape a few weeks from now, and depending on how the story shakes down from here, it may be tempting to suggest Aaron Ramsdale saved Arsenal’s league title challenge at Anfield.In fairness, he seemed to save pretty much everything else on a wild, thrilling afternoon. This was a 2-2 draw that could end up being anything, points saved, points thrown away, corners turned, but which is perhaps best left to spin on its own axis, a self-contained event, elite sport pulled into stirring, ragged, angry shapes, all those patterns and plans and...
Pep Guardiola’s charisma magnet is in mesmeric form, but predictable Liverpool should not be this easy to work outIs anyone in Britain currently having more fun than Jack Grealish? Two minutes before the end of this 4-1 annihilation of Liverpool at the Etihad Stadium Grealish left the pitch to a standing ovation, met by a tender, oddly sensual full body hug from Pep Guardiola, who for a while just wouldn’t let him go, patting his buttocks, whispering in his ear, hungry for Jack love.It isn’t hard to see why Guardiola likes Grealish. He has a way of turning mavericks, flashy destroyers, skill poppets into team cogs. And Grealish does things Pep likes, holding the ball as well as anyone, providing...
Why is it only the big six – aside from Liverpool – who have all-time top scorers who played in the past decade?Last Sunday, amid the gleeful chaos of the 7-0 win over Manchester United, Mohamed Salah became Liverpool’s leading scorer in the Premier League. There is always a slight caution about such statistics – football didn’t begin in 1992, you know – but three decades on the Premier League serves as a useful shorthand for the modern era. But what is perhaps more striking is that Salah is not Liverpool’s all‑time leading scorer. That record still belongs to Ian Rush and that makes Liverpool unique among the big six clubs.Arsenal’s leading all-time scorer is Thierry Henry. Chelsea’s is Frank...
Cody Gakpo, Darwin Núñez and Mohamed Salah all scored twice in Liverpool’s 7-0 humbling of rivals Manchester UnitedThere are few things harder in football management than the dismantling of one side and the construction of another. As Jürgen Klopp’s first Liverpool has aged, it’s been reasonable to ask whether he was equipped to build another. One game, even a record victory over Manchester United, is nowhere near enough to assert that a new Liverpool is being born, but it felt a lot closer at the final whistle than it had at kick-off.Cody Gakpo, Darwin Núñez and Mohamed Salah all scored twice but the goals were only part of it. The front three had a coherence and a zip that has...