The melancholia around the Manchester United forward’s dip in form always seemed overblown – footballers are people tooWhat’s eating Marcus Rashford? Here’s a thought: maybe nothing. Rashford was once again on the bench against West Ham. He stayed there for 62 minutes as United produced a performance that was energetically blank, frantically vague, noisily blunt.Football loves its bold strokes howsoever, and Rashford did the most important thing in this game, scoring with almost the final kick, four yards out in front of an open goal, after a kind of three-man cavalry sprint from close to halfway ended with Edinson Cavani squaring the ball across the box for Rashford to tap it home and spark a kind of rolling delirium around...
Arsenal should stay positive, Potter shows Benítez a trick and VAR makes refereeing harderOn the first Sunday of 2021, a first-half Chelsea capitulation against Manchester City hastened Frank Lampard’s exit and deepened a despondent mood. Twelve months on, Liverpool’s two early goals at Stamford Bridge could have induced Groundhog Day feelings. Instead, Thomas Tuchel’s side roared back and showed that, whatever other problems have recently beset the Chelsea manager on and off the field, this is a team that plays for him. Though they did so in a rather un-Tuchel-like manner. The intense atmosphere generated by the Premier League debut of safe standing was met with the kind of front-foot, high-tempo performance more associated with a Jürgen Klopp side. Chelsea...
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...
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...