Goal of the week
Arsenal stunned Aston Villa 2-0 at home to give Manchester City the lead in the title race. If you’re looking for a microcosm of Ollie Watkins’ season, look no further than his goal from Sunday:
That’s Watkins at his best. He makes an intelligent run and hangs just inside his own half, knowing he can’t be offside. As soon as space becomes available, it explodes. But he doesn’t rush his finishing. He is waiting. He knows Emile Smith-Rowe is following him. Instead of getting up to speed and forcing an early shot, which makes life easier for David Raya in goal, he slows down, stops Smith-Rowe and then waits for Raya to make a move before putting the ball into the net tilt. As the centre-forward’s play progresses, things don’t get much better.
From front to back, Villa were better than Arsenal. They were tactically disciplined, aggressively defending their own box and clinical in counter-attacking. Emi Martínez made one crucial rescue to keep the score at 0-0. They hit the post twice in the second half. They could have finished 4-0 as winners.
Arsenal’s defeat leaves them two points behind City with six games left to play. So much for the most exciting title race in a generation.
Player of the week
It’s hard to find a striker in better form than Alexander Isak anywhere in Europe, except perhaps Isak’s teammate Anthony Gordon. Isak scored twice as Newcastle beat Tottenham 4-0 on Saturday, taking his tally to 18 league goals in 24 games.
Look under the hood, however, and what Isak does is even more impressive. He has become one of the most clinical finishers in Europe:
Isak is the prototypical modern striker, capable of linking play when a defensive line is deep, or happy to sprint into space when playing on the break. And when he gets the chance, he is deadly in front of goal.
Newcastle’s young attackers make the leap together. As a collective, they are smart, fast, ruthless and ruthless – the holy grail.
(Own) Goals of the week
What a week for own goals.
Manchester City won 5-1 against Luton, but their opener deserves a special mention: a wonderful own goal from Daiki Hashioka.
Do you think you’re having a bad day? Imagine how Luton boss Rob Edwards feels. You spend all week training and working to contain Erling Haaland. You map the journeys. You imagine his movement. You build a defensive shield to ensure there are bodies in the penalty area when the ball is fed to his feet. You plan every possibility, knowing that one opening could be enough to get on the scoresheet.
What you can’t plan for is for Haaland to mishit a volley, shoot the ball towards the sideline and shoot the ball into the face of a defender. Oof.
Not to be outdone, Burnley’s Arijanet Muric added to the blooper roll this weekend to give Brighton the equalizer in a 1-1 draw.
It’s been a brutal season for Burnley’s goalkeepers, but Muric’s mistake is the low point. After dropping two points, Burnley are six behind Nottingham Forest in seventeenth place and appear adrift in the relegation phase. Can someone check JJ Watt?
The call for the Paleontologist Prize
Two questionable penalties saved Manchester United from another poor showing at Bournemouth. It ended 2-2, but the manner of the result put more pressure on Erik Ten Hag.
United’s results have been poor for weeks. In the last six league games they only picked up seven points. After 32 games they are four points worse off than under David Moyes in 2013/14. Somehow, the process behind these results is even more discouraging. No team is easier to play through than United. No team is as wasteful – or clueless – in the final third.
Ten Hag’s most pressing concern is that his midfield remains a disjointed mess. And the main concern there is that Casemiro; Ten Hag’s supposed defensive anchor seems to be coming more and more to the fore Petrified.
Playing a man marking system in midfield, as Ten Hag is used torequires midfielders to track and follow the player they are marking. With Bruno Fernandes going wherever he wants, it is left to Casemiro to cover two players. Even the Casemiro of old would have had difficulty with that assignment; today’s Casemiro looks like a fan who won a competition to play for United. He consistently shoots out of the game, trying to make some impact on the ball before having to turn and run back. As soon as the ball is hit past him, he no longer plays a role. If someone asks you what it looks like when a player’s legs are gone, pull up this video.
Here is Casemiro’s pressure card from the match against Bournemouth. The dots are where Casemiro puts pressure on the ball. The arrows are where he is being pressured:
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. In the center of the pitch, where the midfielder usually sits, roughly in the gray area and running from one end of the penalty area to the other, Casemiro pressed the ball zero times. He was pressured four times and coughed up the ball once.
Casemiro’s decline has infected the rest of the United team. United are vulnerable to counter-attacks, partly because of Ten Hag’s defensive system and partly because their midfield stone is frozen in amber as soon as they turn the ball over. It’s a shitty recipe. Ten Hag has paired a slow defensive shield with a group of players who consistently give the ball away as soon as they cross the halfway line. United give away more turnovers than any team in the league and are the least equipped to deal with it.
Casemiro is not the only one to blame. But he is a glaring flaw in everything United try to do.
United treated Bournemouth to twenty shots on Saturday, bringing the total to 574 goals conceded this season. Only Luton (576) have conceded more shots – and Luton have played one more match. It is the most shots a United team has conceded since statistics have been kept.
Ten Hag continues to live in denial about United’s defensive problems. Talking about the number of shots awarded is ‘ridiculous’, Ten Hag said last week. “I can’t do anything with such statistics.”
Diogo Dalot, United’s right back, disagrees. “It was one of our concerns,” Dalot said of the shots conceded against Bournemouth. “Maybe [we should] try to be more compact as a team and try not to make the gap between defenders and midfield too wide.”
Just measuring shots is difficult. Ten Hag would rightly disapprove of the conversation if United were given low-quality chances. They are not. They are conceding some of the best chances in the league. United are in the bottom three of the league in non-penalty xG against, according to Opta, just three expected goals ahead of Sheffield United. That’s relegation stuff.
Statistic of the week
And so Liverpool’s season ended in four days. After suffering a blow at home to Atalanta in the Europa League on Thursday, they were sloppy and wasteful in a 1-0 defeat at home to Crystal Palace.
Arsenal’s defeat will make Liverpool’s slip against Palace all the more painful for Jurgen Klopp. “[I] I really feel like crap,” Klopp said after the match.
Once again Liverpool missed a mountain of opportunities. They finished with 2.87 expected goals, a measure of the quality of chances a team creates, but failed to find the back of the net. It is the highest xG Liverpool have achieved without scoring since 2010/11.
However, the defeat should not be a surprise. There has been a red flag for weeks. Liverpool have won just three of their last eight games in all competitions. And those three wins came against Sparta Prague, Sheffield United and Brighton. They kept a clean sheet in those eight games. All the hallmarks of the team at mid-season – the intensity, sharp passing and smart decision-making – have evaporated.
For the purpose they were careless. But it is the team’s defensive record that will cost Klopp a fairytale farewell. Liverpool played 51 games in all competitions this season. They fell behind 1-0 in 21 of those matches and had to fight, scratch and claw to get results. If we do this every now and then, we are told, it is the sign of champions. But when it becomes a habit that happens in every match, it’s the sign that a sloppy team is unable to take control of a match from the start.
Falling behind in 41% of games is unsustainable. It adds increased pressure – physically and mentally. Over the past two weeks, Liverpool have collapsed under that weight. And their title expectations have seemingly come with it.