It’s only September and we’ve all already got so much wrong about this season, from expecting an actual real-life title race like damn fools, to expecting the promoted teams to just meekly surrender as has become the style of our times.
We feared for Bournemouth, like massive idiots, we thought Graham Potter just needed a pre-season, like even massiver idiots. We thought Man United would be a bit less sh*t this time.
We thought Viktor Gyokeres would either fire Arsenal to the title or flop hard and the awkward bugger isn’t going to do either of those things.
And let’s not even start on that ‘Chelsea title challenge’ we all talked about after the Trump World Cup.
As always, you can see our pre-season predictions in full here. Laugh hard.
We’ll definitely get a proper title race this year!
So angry about this one already. Can’t fault Liverpool, can we? They’re doing their bit. Could hardly have looked more vulnerable if they’d tried, could they? But they’ve still accidentally won all their games despite falling entirely asleep the very moment they take a 2-0 lead.
Meanwhile nobody else can even be bothered. Mikel Arteta is as timid as a tiny mouse with a suspiciously full head of hair, Pep Guardiola is cosplaying Jose Mourinho sufferball for reasons we simply cannot fathom, and Chelsea… well, we’ve got more to say about them later.
Look, it’s obviously very early to be writing off the entire title race, and the main reason people are keen to do so now is in the hope they can call Liverpool bottle jobs later. They are objectively the worst very good team in Premier League history, and a lot of the teams who are better than them at this stage didn’t actually go on to win the league.
But with everyone else shambling about to one extent or other and the sure and certain knowledge that Liverpool are only going to get better as they all get to know each other, it does appear like the best opportunity anyone else had to knock Liverpool off their perch this season was in these early weeks.
It hasn’t happened, either through Liverpool dropping points or anyone else looking much like taking advantage if and when they do. And now it probably won’t happen. The sheer extent to which Arsenal already appear certain to finish second is truly extraordinary. World-class commitment to the bit.
Viktor Gyokeres is the striker to at last propel Arsenal to the title!
He is already the Premier League’s most fascinating player. Incredibly awkward, almost sarcastically un-Arsenal, and entirely incapable of fashioning or creating anything for himself, which means that in the big games where Arteta’s instinct is always going to be safety-first, Gyokeres isn’t going to get a kick. Like he didn’t against United, like he didn’t against Liverpool, like he didn’t against City.
Viktor Gyokeres is going to be a massive flop!
But what Gyokeres does have is an uncanny ability to stick the ball in the net. So in the games where Arteta takes off the handbrake – which across the course of the season will be a far higher percentage of games than has been the case in Arsenal’s undeniably difficult start – he’ll score a whole bunch of goals.
It won’t stop people calling him a massive flop, because a lot of people seem weirdly invested in the idea of Gyokeres as a massive flop. The discourse around him is very strange, perhaps because he is such an awkward-looking player to watch. Nothing about the way he plays football screams £60m superstar in the way it does with, say, a Hugo Ekitike.
He’s going to score loads of goals against all the teams that aren’t brilliant. So he’s not going to be a massive flop. Even now, the only Premier League player with more goals this season than Gyokeres is literally Erling Haaland.
He is, though, going to get called a massive flop because he ‘hasn’t delivered in the big games’. He’s going to be labelled a ‘flat-track bully’ (like literally here). He’s going to be told he hasn’t done enough to shift the needle, because obviously there was no evidence last season that Arsenal might have benefited from someone to consistently score goals against teams like Bournemouth or West Ham or Newcastle or Everton or Brentford or Nottingham Forest or Aston Villa or Brighton or Crystal Palace or Fulham or, well, you get the idea with that.
Above all, though, he’s going to be labelled a flop despite scoring 23 Premier League goals.
We fear for Bournemouth, we really do!
Andoni Iraola, we owe you an apology, we weren’t really familiar with your game. We should have been, because he’s been performing minor Premier League miracles for a good while now with Bournemouth.
But this is surely his greatest trick yet. Having built last season’s considerable success on the strength of his back five, Iraola has now seen four of that five stolen away by assorted members of European football’s collection of big bastards. Huijsen went to Real Madrid. Zabarnyi to PSG. Kerkez to Liverpool. And, to a lesser extent, Kepa to Arsenal.
That was more than enough to place Bournemouth in the large pile of similarly asset-stripped smaller clubs about whom we had significant fear.
We should have had more faith, because what Iraola has done is simply instantly build another brilliant team built on another excellent defence.
A Spurs team that has scored at least twice in each of its four other Premier League games this season could barely muster a meaningful chance across 90 minutes where the sheer extent of the Cherries’ total control of proceedings was almost eerie.
And that was no one-off fluke. Only Liverpool have more points after five games than a team that should by rights have been thoroughly broken by the events of the summer.
And only Liverpool have beaten them, after a ding-dong opening-night battle at Anfield. Bournemouth conceded four goals that night, but have shipped only one since and an upcoming fixture list featuring Leeds, Fulham, Palace and Forest between now and the end of next month offers serious scope for continued defying of Premier League gravity.
Right now they are Champions League-bound and it doesn’t even feel daft.
Graham Potter just needs a proper pre-season!
Sure, it was often very bad indeed in those closing months of last season, but patience was needed. Potter is a details man, who needed to imprint his ideas and methods on to a squad not without its charms.
As it turns out, he didn’t need that at all. What Graham Potter in fact needed was a time machine to go back to the day he took the Chelsea job and punch his past self squarely in the face and talk him out of committing career suicide.
We’re almost certain there is now no chance Potter can save himself at West Ham specifically. It’s just too f*cked. What’s really wild, though, given where he was just a few short years ago is that we’re really not at all sure now how he goes about saving his career at all.
Seriously, think about it. When the inevitable happens and the axe falls and West Ham appoint Gary O’Neil or Nuno to try and do just enough to avoid the ignominy of relegation, where does Potter go next? What’s his next step? Who takes a chance on him, and would he be at all interested in the sort of club that would do that anyway?
He might be even more screwed in this equation than West Ham themselves, and that’s a club currently in some of the deepest despair we’ve ever seen, with a fanbase apparently only now able to agree on what they don’t want rather than what they do.
That’s especially inconvenient because among those things are a terrible stadium and terrible owners that they appear rather stuck with.
If you ask us, it all started to go wrong the moment the entire club tried for some reason we’ve never really understood to gaslight us all into pretending their previous much less soulless stadium had always been widely known as the Boleyn Ground and that nobody had ever called it Upton Park, actually.
Seriously, why did they do that? What was the point?
Chelsea will be real title contenders after winning the Club World Cup!
They won the Club World Cup! And to a less noteworthy degree the Europa Conference! They bought a load of good players again! And sold a lot of rubbish at very decent prices! But still forgot to sign an actual goalkeeper! Which is costing them really badly! And forcing Enzo Maresca to make the single worst collection of substitutions in any Premier League match ever!
Ah, well. An undignified scrap with Spurs et al for fourth it shall be, then. And probably a managerial change as well. He’s just too bald.
The promoted teams will just all get relegated again!
The Barclays giveth and the Barclays taketh away. While the Our League Gods have again, in their infinite wisdom, not deemed it fit to grant us a Proper Title Race they are seemingly going to grant us a good old-fashioned relegation ding-dong after all that promoted-and-immediately-relegated drudgery of the last two years.
Two things were required to make this happen. Some of the Settled Seventeen looking a bit cack, and the promoted trio showing signs of competence.
Happily, we have both. Even Burnley haven’t been entirely wretched, and along with Leeds and Sunderland they have now amassed 19 points from 15 games at 1.27 per game. It’s already pretty much a third of the total points tally the promoted-relegated trio managed last season at 0.57 points per game.
Lovely stuff. And then throw in the catastrophic awfulness of Wolves, West Ham and even Aston Villa, with high potential for your Brentfords or even Nottingham Forests to get themselves into strife and we’ve got ourselves a proper scrap for survival.
Sunderland might challenge Derby’s record!
Worth its own section for the sheer scale of its wrongness. But accustomed as we’d come to seeing promoted sides struggle horribly and armed with the fact that Sunderland looked like a textbook example of a team committing the disastrous error of accidentally winning the play-offs at least a year too early in their process, it was easy to imagine they might have a Southampton-esque tilt at the Premier League’s ultimate wooden spoon.
Technically they still might, of course, but we’re not afraid to admit that on the balance of probabilities a Sunderland team that has managed eight points from its first five games will probably manage to scrape together at least another four from the remaining 33.
There’s a Big Eight now!
We’re really not sure what there is now, because at least two members of the supposed six have been clowning about for a good while now, but what we have all been given is a reminder that you can’t just elevate anyone else you feel like into that Big X territory on the back of a couple of good seasons in and around the top six.
It was a lesson that should have been learned with Brendan Rodgers’ Leicester and one that is now being delivered again by Unai Emery’s Aston Villa.
Newcastle are a slightly different matter because there is still the potential for them to work out means and ways of spending themselves into elite security, but they definitely aren’t there yet.
It really is worth remembering that for all their impeccable banter-club credentials, Spurs’ elevation alongside the more obviously compelling Man City gatecrashing of the old Big Four was based on far, far more than a mere couple of decent seasons on the pitch.
Spurs might not always wield it, but they do have the requisite financial heft to go with on-field results, which did in any case also include finishing inside the top six for every single season throughout the 2010s. Even with their often ropey efforts before and after that time, they are still firmly in the all-time Premier League table’s big six in fifth, over 100 wins and nearly 250 points clear of seventh-placed Everton.
We’ve also just now noticed that Spurs now have exactly 1961 Premier League points, which is nice for them.
Manchester United surely won’t be as bad this season!
Turns out they are just as bad, except against teams that make a series of unfathomably stupid decisions in the opening 21 minutes.
Ruben Amorim remains really quite alarmingly committed to a formation that doesn’t work with a squad that doesn’t suit it, and is now openly goading the dafties he appointed him into sacking him if they don’t like it. Which they won’t because they’re desperately trying to save face themselves.
We now fully expect to see Man United 14th by the November break, Amorim still egging the board on to sack him after every defeat and people still pointing with increased derangement at the ‘underlying numbers’ that supposedly point to corners being turned and a recovery that will quite obviously never come.
