Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 15

Bryan Mbeumo’s retaken penalty helps earn Brentford win at Crystal Palace

For Brentford, there was a measure of relief. It’s probably fair to say that the run of one win in nine games on which they went into this weekend was not representative of how they’d played but still, it’s as well to stifle as early as possible any thought that they were going through a midwinter slump similar to last season’s. Survival may not quite be mathematically assured but breaking the 30-point mark with 15 games remaining makes it almost certain they will be in the Premier League next season.

“The mentality and character of the team was brilliant,” said a clearly delighted Thomas Frank. “We played the conditions right and we defended brilliantly. We decided to go a bit longer with the goal-kicks and in all tricky situations to go behind them with the pace we have.”

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Good Ange is now Bad Postecoglou and caught in the Premier League doom spiral | Jonathan Wilson

Irritable and resentful, the Spurs manager is not unique in being unnerved by a remorseless league where every game is a test

Long before he began experimenting with the mind-expanding potential of psychedelic mushrooms, Timothy Leary was a psychologist. In 1957, he came up with the interpersonal behaviour circumplex, which sought to represent personality using two dimensions: power and love. While relationships on the power axis were oppositional – that is, dominance inspires submission and vice versa – on the love axis they are reflexive: hostility inspires hostility and cooperation inspires cooperation.

This was subsequently developed by Emily and Laurence Alison at the University of Liverpool. In their 2020 book Rapport, they use animals to express the four basic characteristics: a lion for control, a mouse for capitulation, a T-Rex for assertiveness and a monkey for cooperation. None of these are intrinsically good or bad: the lion could be inspiring and supportive, but he could also be patronising or dictatorial. And nor are many people represented by a single animal.

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From Bournemouth to Brighton, the Premier League’s middle class is booming | Jonathan Wilson

A growing number of well-run clubs have shown what can be achieved by recruiting smartly and playing to a system

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This is not 2015-16, when Leicester City won the league, but this season does share certain similarities. After 22 games of that season, Arsenal topped the table on goal difference from Leicester with Manchester City a point back and Tottenham four behind them. It was the following weekend that Leicester began to take control of the league, as they beat Stoke, Manchester City drew at West Ham and Arsenal lost at home to Chelsea. Wins over Manchester City and Liverpool in their following two games consolidated a lead that they never surrendered.

It’s not to diminish Leicester’s achievement to point out that they benefited from a number of elite sides having disappointing seasons: Arsenal came second with only 71 points. The theory then was that the general wealth of the Premier League – the fact that, to use Deloitte’s figures from 2024, Aston Villa, Brighton, Fulham, Leeds, Crystal Palace and Everton are among the 30 wealthiest clubs in the world by revenue – meant that the elite were facing too consistent a challenge for 85-plus points in a season to be a viable target every year. A flourishing middle class, the thought ran, had helped equalise the league, at least at its top end.

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Arsenal’s scrambled brains and missed chances will really hurt Mikel Arteta | Jonathan Wilson

Eight minutes of nonsense have all but put paid to manager’s title dreams after draw with Aston Villa

Mikel Arteta dropped to his haunches, laid his hand on his brow and let his head slump. When he looked up again, he had his thumb and forefinger to his eyes. It was the fifth minute of injury time, Leandro Trossard had just rolled a shot wide and Arsenal’s final chance had vanished. With it, perhaps, so had their hopes of winning the league. At the very least, the gains of Wednesday were handed back.

As it turned out Trossard, who had been Arsenal’s most dangerous forward, may have been a fraction offside anyway, which perhaps would have been the most fitting conclusion. In the previous eight minutes, Mikel Merino had seen a goalbound shot deflected in off Kai Havertz’s hand and hit the inside of a post. There was a sense in those closing stages of the fates, or at least Arsenal’s chronic inability to seize the moment, being against them.

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There’s nothing lucky about Forest’s rise with Nuno’s hot hand at the controls | Jonathan Wilson

Manager’s clarity of vision has ensured that confidence has blossomed at the Premier League’s surprise package

There was a period when datawallahs insisted confidence didn’t exist – which came as a surprise to almost everybody who has ever played sport at any level. There are days when you feel invincible, when every putt drops, when every ball pitches in the right place, when you claim every cross. And there are days when your club may as well be a Toblerone, when catching the easiest dolly seems an impossible feat of calculation and coordination, when your legs simply will not function. Vast screeds were written dismissing the “hot-hand fallacy”.

Then, in 2020, the journalist Ben Cohen wrote The Hot Hand, which demonstrated a flaw in previous calculations and decided that the hot hand – a term from basketball referring to a player on a scoring streak – does exist. From a layman’s perspective, the tests employed always seemed so artificial to be highly questionable anyway. And it always seemed a little odd that two of the real boom areas of sports science – data analytics and psychology – would take up apparently contradictory positions: one insisting a positive mental outlook meant nothing and the other that it was essential.

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The familiar failings putting Arsenal’s trophy hopes in real danger | Jonathan Wilson

Mikel Arteta’s team have had a painful start to 2025 and are now facing challenges in three competitions

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For Arsenal, the pattern was all too familiar. They won the xG against Manchester United on Sunday, depending which model you prefer, by around 3.5 to 0.5, but they drew the game 1-1 and with a certain inevitability, lost on penalties. The previous Tuesday, in the first leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final, they’d won the xG 3.1-1.2 but lost 2-0 to Newcastle. The previous Saturday, in the league, they drew 1-1 at Brighton despite having won the xG 1.5-0.9. They have begun 2025 by failing to turn dominance into goals and, very quickly, their hopes of a trophy are evaporating.

This was a very good weekend for the FA Cup. Plymouth, bottom of the Championship, pulled off the big upset by eliminating Brentford, while League Two Bromley went ahead before succumbing to Newcastle, non-league Tamworth took Tottenham to extra-time and there were further shocks as Doncaster and Exeter eliminated Hull and Oxford. But the culmination of Sunday’s sulphuric clash at the Emirates: no sense there of Premier League sides soft-pedalling. For Arsenal, the consequences could be hugely significant.

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition

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Manchester United hit the spot and Tamworth come so close: Football Weekly - podcast

Max Rushden, Jonathan Wilson, Jonathan Liew and Nedum Onuoha review all the action from the FA Cup third round

Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.

On the podcast today: Manchester United win on penalties at Arsenal. Altay Bayindir was the hero for the visitors, but Arsenal missed so many chances – are you ready for another conversation about whether they need a striker?

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James Rodríguez is a player out of time who brings his best to international stage | Jonathan Wilson

The 2014 Golden Boot winner flopped at Everton and faded away at Real Madrid but is still a maestro for Colombia

On Monday, Rayo Vallecano released James Rodríguez on a free transfer. It hadn’t been much of a stay. In four and a half months at the club, he managed 136 minutes of league football. Only once did he start in La Liga. Rodríguez is 33 now. Since he left Everton in 2021, he has started just 37 league games and scored only 10 goals. This is the sixth season in a row in which he has been released on a free transfer as he has drifted from Real Madrid to the team currently 12th in the table, via Qatar, Greece and Brazil. The sense is of a waning career nearing its end.

And yet in those three and a half years since his last game for Everton, Rodríguez has played 32 times for Colombia. While at Rayo, he has played 374 international minutes. True, he doesn’t often last a full game, but there are few other indications of decline. As Colombia reached the final of last year’s Copa América, he was named player of the tournament. His is a career that seems to run on two parallel tracks: at club level he is a fading star, a player who perhaps never quite lived up to his potential. But at international level, while in the autumn of his career, he remains a maestro.

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Plymouth move on from Rooney with famous FA Cup shock at Brentford

They might have pulled the plug on the documentary a week too soon. It’s been a strange two weeks for Plymouth.

First they sacked Wayne Rooney. Then, despite being managerless, they broke their transfer record to sign the Ghana forward Michael Baidoo.

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Dyche dismissal is a risk that puts Everton’s need to stay up in sharp focus | Jonathan Wilson

Manager’s sacking is no shock given his dour football but successor has a perilous task. Could Moyes be the right fit?

It was life, but was it living? Everton have lost only four of their past 16 games in all competitions. They have kept five clean sheets in their past eight games and in the past month have frustrated Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City. They’ve taken 17 points from 19 games this season, which the past decade of the Premier League would suggest, if repeated in the second half of the season, would leave them right on the edge of relegation.

Given the trend is for the relegated three to get fewer and fewer points, the sense is that, even with Wolves and Ipswich showing signs of improvement, they would probably have survived if Sean Dyche had stayed.

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