Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 16

Liverpool’s holiday wobble won’t matter if their rivals can’t punish it | Jonathan Wilson

Liverpool may have got away with one in Sunday’s thrilling draw with Manchester United. But without a sustained challenge from those in chase, it may not matter

Title races are never just about the winners. In other circumstances, a run of three draws in six games for Liverpool might be cause for concern. Are they tightening up? Is there validity to that vague sense that the fixture list so far has been kind to them? But even if there is, it doesn’t really matter. Before the first of those draws, at Newcastle on 4 December, they were nine points clear of Arsenal in second; after Sunday’s draw at home to Manchester United, they are six points clear of Arsenal with a game in hand.

And that really has been the story of the past month, the great hectic splurge of the festive period. There has been a lot of heat and light, a lot of drama and excitement, and in the end not much has changed. Liverpool were far from their best on Sunday, could easily have suffered a surprise defeat, but in seven of the last nine match days the chasing pack of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City have managed one or fewer wins between them. That does, admittedly, leave Nottingham Forest, who will close to six points with a game in hand if they beat Wolves on Monday, and who are Liverpool’s next league opponents, but it has been a remarkable achievement for Nuno Espírito Santo’s side to get to where they are; realistically there is going to be some drop-off in the second half of the season.

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Ruben Amorim shapes up as Manchester United’s fall guy but rot runs deeper | Jonathan Wilson

Unbending coach takes his side to Liverpool on Sunday, with attempts to kick club on undermined by a decade of misrule

The thought had always been that it couldn’t happen now. It’s just not possible in modern football that a super-club could be relegated. Manchester United may have gone down in 1974 but it’s not going to happen in 2025. Even when Ruben Amorim said that United were in a relegation battle after Monday’s 2-0 defeat by Newcastle, he was making the point to shock.

And it’s not going to happen now. United will not be relegated. They probably only need 15 points from the second half of the season to be safe and the financial structure of modern football means there are at least three sides worse than them. Yet it’s significant that Amorim could mention relegation without it sounding entirely absurd, revealing that it feels worth doing the calculation, working out what sort of tally might be necessary for United to survive. What has happened at United since Sir Alex Ferguson left feels like thought experiment made flesh: what would it take for the most successful side in English history to go down?

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Postecoglou ‘angriest I have ever been’ after handball decision costs Spurs

‘With logical thought processes we win that game’Newcastle’s Howe says officials followed protocols

Ange Postecoglou described himself as “really, really angry”, the “angriest I think I have ever been in my career” that his players were “denied the right rewards for a fantastic performance” after Saturday’s 2-1 home defeat to Newcastle.

Although he repeatedly refused to specify he was talking about the refereeing and the decision not to rule out Newcastle’s equaliser for handball, there was little doubt what he was referring to. “I think it’s clear,” he said.

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Tuchel’s notebook: what England’s head coach may have learned at Tottenham

Newcastle duo catch the eye in first Premier League game Thomas Tuchel has attended since contract officially started

It didn’t take long for the Thomas Tuchel effect to be felt. By the time six minutes had been played at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium under the – seemingly quite grumpy – eye of the new England head coach, two English players had scored with excellent finishes, Dominic Solanke with a plunging header and Anthony Gordon with a calm angled shot. If there were concerns about Gordon’s positioning for Solanke’s goal, they could be excused in the context of a generally excellent defensive performance from Newcastle.

Nine of the starters were England-qualified, even with James Maddison on the bench. Of most interest to Tuchel, perhaps, would have been a Newcastle pairing with which he is already familiar. It was Tuchel who gave Lewis Hall his full Chelsea debut, starting him on the left of a back three in a 5-1 FA Cup win over Chesterfield in 2022. Later that year, around a month before Tuchel was sacked, Chelsea had a £40m bid for Gordon rejected by Everton. Newcastle’s left flank is the left side Chelsea could have had and the left side England might favour in the future.

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Isak extends Newcastle hot streak to increase heat on Postecoglou’s Spurs

Ange Postecoglou stood, as he always does, hands in pockets, at the edge of his technical area. It had been another frustrating afternoon, a defeat that means Spurs have now won just one of their last eight league games. There was ­general grumbling rather than targeted fury, but the clear sense of another season drifting away for Spurs. For Newcastle, meanwhile, a fifth successive Premier League win means Champions League ­qualification, which looked highly unlikely when they lost at Brentford a month ago, seems a suddenly ­realistic target.

Of course it was going to be like this; how could it not have been? This is just the way Spurs do it, mate. There stands Postecoglou; he can do no other. But there also stands Radu Dragusin, and there stands Pape Matar Sarr, mystifyingly far apart. This is about philosophies, but it’s not only about philosophies. There is no ­system in which the opposition should be allowed to wander through the spaces in the way Newcastle did at times towards the end of the first half. That is not anybody’s process, and Eddie Howe’s side, particularly before half-time, took full advantage.

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Promotion to the Premier League is tough. But is survival effectively impossible? | Jonathan Wilson

If Leicester, Ipswich and Southampton go down this season, that will be 10 of the last 15 promoted sides who have gone straight back down

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And so the year ends, as always seemed likely, with the bottom three places in the Premier League occupied by the three promoted sides. With Wolves and Crystal Palace resurgent and Everton under new ownership and having found the solidity that is always the key strength of Sean Dyche teams, the situation is bleak for the three currently in the relegation zone. Each will have their own reflections on the first half of the season but, more generally, the picture is worrying: the three promoted sides were relegated last season and the gulf between Premier League and Championship is coming to feel almost impossibly wide.

The bottom side Southampton are 10 points from safety. Realistically they probably need to average a point and a half a game from here to stay up – which is to say that they are as good as down. The two games since Russell Martin was sacked have shown an improvement, but even then battling performances at Fulham and Crystal Palace have yielded a single point. Perhaps they would have had a better chance of survival had they not been wedded to a high-risk passing style that kept on surrendering possession in dangerous areas but, in truth, this never looked anything like a Premier League squad. The priority now must be to acquire the six points they need to avoid breaking Derby’s record low of 11 points for the season.

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Age of tactical ideologues is over as Spain dominates new era of pragmatism | Jonathan Wilson

Coaches such as Arteta, Iraola and Emery play variations of the Guardiola model – flexibility and adaptability are in vogue

Spain are the European champions. Real Madrid won the Champions League. Rodri won the Ballon d’Or and has only come to seem more important since suffering an anterior cruciate ligament injury. Spanish managers won the Premier League, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 last season. No fewer than five Premier League clubs are managed by Spaniards.

It has been another year of Spanish domination but the manager who more than anybody has been the architect of what is now considered the Spanish style is facing the biggest crisis of his career.

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Your questions from the Christmas mailbag – Football Weekly

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson and John Brewin for a special festive Q&A

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, in what is now an annual tradition we’ve gathered some of your questions on topics ranging from the greatest goal you ever saw live through to favourite tv chefs.


Plus: festive messages from all your favourite panellists. Merry Christmas from all at Football Weekly!


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Everybody seems to be having an off-day when they play against Liverpool

Liverpool keep doing Liverpool things. The Premier League is now theirs to lose, and for a manager in his first season in England, that is a remarkable achievement

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Eventually, there comes a point at which the fact that everybody seems to be having an off-day when they play against Liverpool has to be taken as a Liverpool thing rather than a quirk of the calendar. They head into the Christmas programme four points clear of Chelsea at the top of the table with a game in hand having lost only one of 16 games. While this will always in part be the season when Manchester City imploded, it should also be pointed out that Liverpool at the moment are on course for 93 points; only four times has the champion ever won more than that.

Even with Liverpool’s consistency there’s a tendency to look at Sunday’s 6-3 win at Tottenham as a result of the inexcusable openness of Tottenham rather than of their own excellence. And it is true that it’s easier to play Spurs right now, when they’re missing Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven, when Ange Postecoglou is doubling down even further on doing things his way, than it might have been at certain other points of the season. But at the same time, Spurs tend, relatively at least, to be better against teams who come at them, who give them space behind the defensive line they can attack, and until the game disintegrated into mass silliness in its final quarter, Liverpool gave them a lesson.

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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Ivan Juric watches on as solid Southampton claim point at Fulham

It turns out it wasn’t so hard after all. Southampton stopped giving the ball away in their own half, adopted an approach rooted in expediency and kept their second clean sheet of the campaign. Salvation remains a long way distant but a point, only the second they have taken away from home, means there is at least something to build on in the post-Russell Martin era.

Southampton’s new coach, Ivan Juric, who signed an 18-month contract on Friday, was in the stand at Craven Cottage, peering through the bitter rain driving down the Thames as Simon Rusk conducted affairs from the dugout. What he oversaw was 90 minutes of very little, which from a Southampton point of view must have come as a welcome change. Even the arrival, for his league debut, of the Fulham winger Martial Godo, for which everybody has been waiting, failed to bring anything approaching resolution.

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