Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 21

Never underestimate the true ‘Spursiness’ of this Tottenham team | Jonathan Wilson

Ange Postecoglou looked shell-shocked as club demons come back to haunt them in capitulation at Brighton

If only there were a word for that sort of performance from Tottenham. At half-time, they were 2-0 up and seemed utterly in control, Dejan Kulusevski and Brennan Johnson ripping Brighton apart down the right.

They were so dominant that the instinct was to start recalling great Spurs collapses of the past – 3-0 up against Manchester United in 2001, 3-0 up against 10-man Manchester City in 2004, the leads lost in the two 5-2 defeats by Arsenal in 2012, 2-0 up against Chelsea in the Battle of the Bridge in 2016, 3-0 up after 82 minutes against West Ham in 2020 – if only because it seemed so unlikely something similar could happen again. But the Spursiness of Spurs is never to be underestimated.

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Too much too soon: glimmers of light from Chelsea’s splurge but at what cost? | Jonathan Wilson

Talents such as Nicolas Jackson are making waves in Enzo Maresca’s squad but plenty of others are going nowhere

Thirteen points from their past six games, 15 goals scored, and Chelsea went into the weekend fourth in the Premier League table. The mood suddenly has changed. What crisis? Maybe the great disruptors had it right all along. Or at least maybe now that they seem set on disrupting each other and the focus has shifted to potential buyouts and leadership squabbles, Enzo Maresca has been able to get on with building a team.

Decisions that seemed baffling at the time can now be cast in a more favourable light. When Raheem Sterling released a statement seconds after the official announcement that he had been left out of Chelsea’s opening game of the season, it seemed indicative of the chaos at the club. If they had no need for him, why had he played such a prominent role in pre-season? And why, given their much-vaunted policy of buying young players on long contracts with a relatively low base wage but lucrative bonuses, was he on a reported £350,000 a week?

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Shapeless, demotivated, petulant … Ten Hag’s ghost ship continues to drift on | Jonathan Wilson

Another thumping home defeat highlights a weak club that did not know what it wanted in the summer, or lacked the nous to get what it wanted over the line

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Who did not think that, sooner or later, we’d be here again? At the end of last season, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Sir Dave Brailsford and the rest of the Ineos leadership at Manchester United spoke to numerous potential candidates after the club finished eighth in the Premier League with a negative goal-difference. They decided they would, after all, keep Erik ten Hag on as manager. After that decision, who did not foresee a point in the near future when, after another run of poor results, they would be back in the same place as before, just several million pounds poorer having bought another load of Dutch and Dutch-adjacent players?

This is United and that means these problems are always complicated by the memory of Sir Alex Ferguson, who endured some lean years before finally winning the league in his seventh season at the club. The instinct for fans is always to show patience. Nobody wants to be Pete Molyneux, the fan who held up a banner reading “Three years of excuses and it’s still crap … ta-ra Fergie” six months before the decisive 1990 FA Cup triumph that was a springboard to Ferguson’s success.

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What now for Manchester United after another new low? – Football Weekly podcast

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Lucy Ward, and Jonathan Wilson to discuss all the weekend’s Premier League action

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On the podcast today, the panel breaks down where it went wrong for Manchester United and where it went right for Tottenham at Old Trafford. What is next for Manchester United and Erik ten Hag?

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Romantic swirl of Villa v Ipswich four decades ago feels so quaint as to be absurd | Jonathan Wilson

Football clubs exist now to generate content for television and money for their owners – the fans have lost so much in 40 years

It has been 40 years since Ipswich last beat Aston Villa in the top flight at Portman Road. Alan Sunderland had put Ipswich ahead early, but the game turned on the dismissals of Villa’s Peter Withe and Colin Gibson in the first 10 minutes of the second half. Russell Osman and Eric Gates rounded off a 3-0 win for Ipswich.

You don’t have to know that the opener stemmed from fine approach play from Gates and Kevin O’Callaghan, who played the Allied goalkeeper Tony Lewis in Escape to Victory – “Make it a clean break, skipper” – to feel a frisson of nostalgia; you just have to be about 50 years old.

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Newcastle show Guardiola he won’t solve issue of Rodri’s absence any time soon | Jonathan Wilson

Anthony Gordon’s equaliser is the sort of goal City wouldn’t concede with their talisman, and that spells trouble

There are times when a football pitch can look very small and you start to wonder whether perhaps, in these days of hyper-fit, hyper-organised athletes, the playing area needs to be stretched, or a player or two per side removed. And there are other times when the pitch looks enormous, a giant patchwork of Rodri-shaped holes.

There is a danger when the absence of Rodri is so pressing, when everybody is so aware of Rodri not being there, that it feels like every pass in the final third would have been cut out by Rodri.

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Arsenal fall short against City again despite Arteta’s full embrace of his inner Mourinho

A draw represents a missed opportunity after Arsenal’s defensive diligence and gamesmanship frazzled Pep Guardiola at the Etihad

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The expectation – perhaps the fear – had been that Manchester City against Arsenal would be like their two league meetings last season: of undoubted high quality and tension, but a little tepid, lacking the blood and thunder to live long in the memory for neutrals. Instead, what played out was a classic, a game of a million subplots, of controversy and brilliance and doziness that became, ultimately, almost a re-enactment of José Mourinho’s Internazionale eliminating Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona in the 2010 Champions League semi-final.

Arsenal had kept nine clean sheets in 11 away league games this year with the win over Tottenham last week, via a header from a corner after a stifling defensive display, making clear that Mikel Arteta, although he served an apprenticeship as Guardiola’s assistant, is in no sense a Guardiola clone. Many even said he has a streak of Mourinho (who himself, of course, was schooled in the Barcelona method before adapting it) but, still, few thought that by Sunday afternoon he’d have embraced the role with such gusto.

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This Manchester United team specialise in not doing as well as might be expected | Jonathan Wilson

They could very easily have beaten Crystal Palace, and yet left more questions piling up about their manager Erik ten Hag

The good news for Erik ten Hag and Manchester United is that it was better than last season. But if his mission this season is to improve a little on every equivalent fixture from the last campaign, this was the easy bit. A 4-0 defeat at Crystal Palace in May was probably the nadir of a season that had many lows. Saturday’s goalless draw probably does represent progress, but the picture is far from clear.

United were by far the better side before half-time and, but for the woodwork and Dean Henderson, would have had a comfortable lead; in the game as a whole, Henderson made seven saves with a combined xG of 1.65. There is an alternative universe not very far removed from this one in which United scored with one of their early chances and went on to win just as comfortably as they had at Southampton last week. But these days, that’s just not how it goes for United.

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This season Arteta must be ready to seize an opportunity if City present one | Jonathan Wilson

A goalless draw at the Etihad last season cast Arsenal as frontrunners but they need to better balance aggression with defence

It is the nature of the modern Premier League, in which 90 points has come to feel like a basic minimum to win the title, that analysis of how the league was won tends to focus on where it was lost. Manchester City’s excellence has become so relentless that the assumption is they will surpass 90 points. The question is less about anything they have done than whether other teams could have done anything to overhaul that total.

In that context, the mind goes back to the final day of March last season, and Arsenal’s trip to Manchester City. Liverpool had beaten Brighton earlier in the day, giving them a three-point lead over Arsenal and four over City, having played a game more. Arsenal were content to frustrate City, drawing 0-0.

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North London derby defeat raises further doubts about Ange Postecoglou | Jonathan Wilson

Tottenham have picked up 44 points from their last 32 league games and troubling patterns from last season have carried over to the new campaign

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It was, as everybody pointed out, inevitable that the north London derby would be decided by a set play, Gabriel heading the only goal in the second half as Tottenham in general, and Cristian Romero in particular, switched off. It was a win that kept Arsenal within touching distance of Manchester City – and that it’s not absurd to think in such terms even at this early stage of the season suggests just how City’s relentless excellence has affected the perspective – but it also raised further doubts about Ange Postecoglou.

The heady start to last season, in which Spurs took 26 points from their first 10 games under the Australian, feels a long time ago. It was inevitable there would be some sort of regression to the mean but 44 points from their subsequent 32 games is a poor enough record to raise concerns. Extrapolate that over a season and you get 52, which is what West Ham got last season in finishing ninth. For Tottenham, with their expenditure and their stadium, that would be far from acceptable. Cherrypicking isolated parts of a season is never entirely fair, but 32 games is a hefty sample size.

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