Harry Kane is out of sorts, Joe Hart soars before being floored, and Stoke must choose between youth and experience up frontWhile Southampton will take something from getting this far in the world’s most celebrated domestic cup competition there are other, more pressing priorities, such as making a late dash for safety in the Premier League. Can they take any hope from their performance? Not from the first half. Olivier Giroud’s goal at the beginning of the second period forced Mark Hughes to change things, however, and it was to his team’s benefit. A 3-5-2 became a 3-4-3 and suddenly Charlie Austin was getting service. Southampton will feel they could and should have had an equaliser before Chelsea settled the...
The Frenchman will doubtless receive a vociferous send-off in due course but the crowd’s response was low-key during the 4-1 victory over West hamThe promise had come from Ivan Gazidis. Arsène Wenger’s final game at the Emirates Stadium, the chief executive thundered, would feature “a send-off that the world will take notice of”. That is for later – 6 May against Burnley, to be precise. But what of the manager’s third last home match and, more importantly, the first since the announcement on Friday that he would walk away from Arsenal at the end of the season?The hope and, indeed, the expectation had been for an outpouring of affection to mirror that seen from within the game and across social media since...
José Mourinho needs to make drastic changes, Rafael Benítez is getting best out of his players and Jordan Ayew is on a missionHaving so meekly allowed Manchester City to claim the Premier League title, a process of rebuilding Manchester United into future champions starts now. The non-inclusion of Marouane Fellaini, Daley Blind, Matteo Darmian and Luke Shaw in José Mourinho’s match‑day 18 for this game at Old Trafford indicated where a long-awaited clear-out of David Moyes and Louis van Gaal recruits is likely to begin. But it will take more than that to revitalise United. The shapeless sludge of this performance against West Brom was no anomaly. Chief among the reasons United have been left in City’s wake is Mourinho’s...
Danny Welbeck remains an enigma, Marko Arnautovic goes it alone and Rafael Benítez delivers a lesson to his bossDanny Welbeck stayed true to form by mixing the sublime with the ridiculous during Arsenal’s 3-2 victory over Southampton, producing a contender for miss of the season moments before nodding in the winner. The striker’s header was his second goal of the afternoon and proof, perhaps, that he is getting back to his best after an injury‑ravaged season. “Danny Welbeck is getting sharper,” Arsène Wenger said. “I am pleased for him. I have seen him behave when it was really hard. He had every reason to feel sorry for himself and feel the mountain was too big to climb – right knee,...
At Chelsea on Sunday, as at many other clubs over the weekend, it was all about Ray Wilkins. But in the background it was hard to avoid the feeling of change and uncertainty to comeFarewell, then, to all that. A rainy Sunday on the Fulham Road, a humdrum April draw and the embers of another fading champion Chelsea team: by the end this felt like a fitting time to say goodbye to one of the most genial Stamford Bridge regulars, and indeed one of the more popular figures of the last 50 years in English football.There is a fair chance that Ray Wilkins would have been here to witness this 1-1 draw, a game that sparked in the middle and ended with...