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...
The defining player and dominant manager have had their day – now a club’s route to success is to catch the eye of a sugar daddyPatrick Vieira gone! Antonio Conte gone! Brendan Rodgers gone! Graham Potter gone! More managers have left Premier League clubs in the past four weeks than in the entire 2005-06, 2003-04 or 1995-96 seasons. The past month has not quite matched the chaos of November 1994, when Ossie Ardiles, Mike Walker, Ron Atkinson, Gerry Francis and Brian Little left their jobs, but for managers this has been the most turbulent season in Premier League history, with 13 leaving mid‑campaign.It may not be over yet. Last Sunday was the first time since 4 October 2015 that two...
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...
Fortunes on the pitch have changed this season but, as global super-clubs, they resemble each other more and moreIt was October 2021 and Jürgen Klopp was in a knife-twisting mood. “United never look happy when they play us,” he told his Liverpool squad in their final team meeting before their visit to Old Trafford. “They always want to use this game to sort out everything. We are different. We want to squeeze everything out of this amazing situation we have here.” The subtext was clear enough: this was a team liable to shatter on first contact. In for the kill.Before the game, as Liverpool coach Pep Lijnders recounts in his book Intensity, Klopp and his staff homed in on United’s...