Arsenal dodged a comical banana skin in Spurs, Erling Haaland cooked for once, Arne Slot settled an old score and Oliver Glasner deeply hates his life.
There are also words of varying degrees of kindness for Leeds, Nottingham Forest, Tony Bloom and Brentford.
Refresh your minds with a look at the Premier League table after the weekend’s fixtures, before Everton go seventh by beating Manchester United at the Hill Dicky.
Premier League winners
Eberechi Eze
These are generational, aspirational levels of hatred.
Arsenal
The narrative had they failed to win would have been uncontrollable: Arsenal are intrinsic bottlers who cannot get over the line, Manchester City are already in their heads with three months of the season left, and Mikel Arteta must be sacked.
Actually, that last point still stands. And contrast the reaction to Arsenal’s celebrations at winning a north London derby and Manchester City’s after beating Newcastle at home for proof of how these two teams, managers and players will always be judged differently.
But in overcoming a bumbling Spurs side which might as well have rocked up dressed in a massive banana skin tossed onto the pitch by a furious Igor Tudor, Arsenal again defied those outdated cliches around their mentality.
They might still emerge from this campaign with nothing. It would ultimately be the funniest and most predictable outcome. But going into all four competitions as favourites as March beckons, having survived a couple of wobbles which would have caused previous Arsenal teams to collapse, is an elevated brand of failure.
At the very least, the doomsday scenario of Spurs being the ones to bring everything crashing down has been averted. And there is genuinely something to be said for that, especially with Chelsea at home next.
Erling Haaland
Nico O’Reilly deciding to become the Premier League’s best player in about three different positions is handy ahead of the World Cup, but compliments to the chef: that cross from Haaland was glorious.
The Golden Boot leader trails only Bruno Fernandes for assists in the Premier League this season; it feels like the debate over whether he brings enough to the team beyond his goalscoring has been finished with a great many plombs by his improved all-round play.
Rio Ngumoha
His name is Rio and he really should probably be starting ahead of Mo Salah and Cody Gakpo now.
Arne Slot
Beating Nottingham Forest 1-0 away in a relative smash-and-grab must rank highly among Slot’s most satisfying personal achievements. Just imagine when Liverpool beat Paris Saint-Germain on penalties in the Champions League.
READ MORE: Liverpool as bad as ‘dark days of Hodgson’ against Forest
Leeds
With the slight and obvious caveat that the season is unfinished and thus positions are uncertain, one of the more remarkable aspects of this relatively serene stroll to Premier League safety for Leeds is how well they have acquitted themselves against the elite.
It was an entirely predictable blind spot for Daniel Farke in his previous experience of the top flight. He mustered 10 points in 26 games across his one-and-not-quite-a-third seasons as Norwich manager against teams that finished the season tenth or higher.
Yet he has Leeds seventh and flying in a table of result against sides currently in the top half, with a better record than Liverpool and anyone eighth or lower in the actual table in such games.
They are actually the only club to have accrued more points against top-half teams (17) than bottom-half ones (14), even if those sands are perennially shifting.
This calendar year alone Leeds have taken a point from each member of that slightly faltering pack chasing a Champions League qualification place.
Having the signing of the season in their ranks is helpful but Leeds have become better than anyone at bloodying gilded noses.
Raul Jimenez
The only players older than Jimenez (eight) with more league goals across Europe’s top five divisions this season are Robert Lewandowski (ten) and Danny Welbeck (nine).
The greatest penalty-taker in Premier League history also has more assists and yellow cards than both. He is the game’s preeminent distinguished line-leader.
Tony Bloom
It would be worth delving deeper into Fabian Hurzeler’s slight tactical change to deliver a pressure-relieving Brighton win, in which they were more direct and produced a higher volume of shots from outside the box than usual – as was evident for Diego Gomez’s opportunistic opener.
But really it’s funnier to marvel at how a two-decade feud continues to fuel games between two of the best-run clubs in the country.
If Tony Bloom truly does offer bonuses to his players if they can beat Brentford and their owner – his nemesis – Matthew Benham, he will consider this season’s double pay-out entirely worth it.
Mads Hermansen
Only Angus Gunn (one in one appearance) and David Raya (13 in 28 appearances) have a better clean sheet ratio than Hermansen (three in seven appearances) in the Premier League this season.
A year to the day since he was conceding four at home to Brentford for doomed Leicester, Hermansen was helping fortify an increasingly convincing West Ham survival push. Axel Disasi and Dinos Mavropanos might be a better combination than Wout Faes and Caleb Okoli.
Aston Villa’s ongoing tribute to Frank Lampard’s Chelsea
Maybe the 2019/20 Chelsea season imprinted particularly profoundly on Unai Emery, or his squad composition at Aston Villa six years later was always designed as specific mind games against Leeds.
But the deployment of both Tammy Abraham and Ross Barkley from the bench while Ian Maatsen was stationed on the left must have brought a tear to Lampardian eyes.
No player won more duels at Villa Park than Barkley in his half-hour cameo; Abraham thighed in his first Premier League goal since Emile Smith Rowe saved Mikel Arteta’s job.
The pressure is on to figure out who Villa will sign in their Champions League reinforcement push this summer. Emery would definitely still get a tune out of a 38-year-old Pedro.
Burnley
Three consecutive draws at Stamford Bridge, under and against three different managers (Dyche v Tuchel, Kompany v Pochettino and Parker v Rosenior), is a great bit of Barclays.
James Hill
Get that passport renewed just in case, fella.
Premier League losers
Spurs
Openly wondering which of their remaining games might get Spurs relegated is incredible fun; the dream of them balancing Championship and Champions League football simultaneously next season continues apace.
Nottingham Forest
Vitor Pereira was broadly right in that it was “difficult to explain” how Nottingham Forest lost that one. Having almost twice as many shots as Liverpool but ignoring the specific warning of Alexis Mac Allister scoring in stoppage time felt far more inexplicable than their previous 13 defeats.
Yet the general through line of profligacy was a familiar one. Forest are the lowest scorers in the Premier League bar Wolves, have drawn a blank in nearly half their games and are not close to stable enough defensively to account for such attacking waste.
It was different when Nuno’s structures were complemented by a fit Chris Wood, as opposed to this mix of coaching ideals being backed up by whatever Morgan Gibbs-White can muster while single-handedly shouldering the club’s goal burden.
“But we are creating, yes?” was the headstrong but ultimately forlorn response from Pereira when put to him that Forest’s finishing threatened to undermine any hopes of him keeping them up.
And they are, but it matters little without that decisive final touch. The Portuguese kept Wolves up by getting a tune out of Matheus Cunha and Jorgen Strand Larsen; who can he rely on to make a similar impact in this Forest squad?
Chelsea
Good luck to Liam Rosenior in addressing problems which got Mauricio Pochettino and Enzo Maresca fired but definitely absolutely surely won’t eventually snare him.
The bloke can’t even go for a pint after a difficult day of being held responsible for modern Chelsea’s ridiculousness without having his aura levels questioned.
Ultimately, if a manager is going to be judged because supposedly elite footballers ignore their homework and are incapable of identifying the issues in failing to mark a 6ft 1in centre-forward from a James Ward-Prowse corner, we’re all f**ked.
Brentford
They will probably have taken bottling European qualification if offered at the start of the season, so there is a need for perspective when evaluating a result which still leaves Brentford in seventh with 11 games remaining.
But the Premier League’s form team over the previous ten games losing so meekly to a side with one win in 13 matches feels like an infuriatingly avoidable if wonderfully Arsenal-angering mishap.
This Brentford losing to that Brighton must go down as one of the weirder results of the season. And there is a growing frustration in the fanbase at Keith Andrews, as exceptional a job as he has done, struggling to change games when the Bees are losing.
It is an imperfect measure of a manager’s effectiveness when altering the course of a match but only David Moyes and Pep Guardiola of ever-present coaches this season have made fewer goalscoring substitutions in the Premier League. And Andrews’ three all came in September and October.
Oliver Glasner
Quite foolishly beat Wolves – in the least convincing way possible so fair play – to elongate the most unnecessary hate-hate relationship in modern football history.
The openness of the sham nature of Crystal Palace marriage has reached absurd levels. Glasner echoing Roy Hodgson’s call for fans to “be humble” completes a bizarre full circle in which the Eagles have won the actual FA Cup and qualified for sodding Europe, but are still being told by the club’s chief mouthpiece to remember where they’ve come from.
In reality, all supporters are really asking for is to not be so publicly and frequently ‘disrespected’ by an obviously brilliant manager who decided months ago he no longer wanted to be there.
All they can do from the stands is watch this staring contest between an outgoing coach and a board which refuses to incur the small cost of dispensing with him early, even if it might rescue a modicum of goodwill heading into the sort of summer uncertainty Palace seemed to have grown out of.
Sunderland
Game states do need to be taken into account but Sunderland winning two of the ten Premier League games in which they have had 49 per cent possession or more, while winning four and losing just one of the matches in which they have had 41 per cent of the ball or less, points to understandable struggles in adjusting their game plan.
Fulham ceded territory, worked specifically on transitions and exposed Sunderland’s inherent limitations when asked to dictate the play.
Their form from August to December has them clear enough of danger already, even if they do not pick up another point. But everything from January onwards has been a timely reminder that Sunderland start from zero again next season and are in a precarious spot.
Newcastle
Damned by the faint praise of being called an “incredible, complete team” and “nightmare” to play against by Pep Guardiola, Newcastle can take heart from the defeat at Manchester City in isolation.
It was a relatively solid defensive performance given the opposition and venue, with Lewis Hall providing a flash of their latent attacking qualities in a narrow defeat.
But that is four losses in five Premier League games, a meagre two wins in 11 and another lesson in how wide that gulf to the elite is: Newcastle are 15th, level on points with Spurs in a table versus top-half teams, and Eddie Howe’s personal record at the Etihad is now P12 W0 D0 L12 F5 A37.
Those are Steve Bruce and Sam Allardyce levels of deference; at least Sir Alex Ferguson never publicly patted them on the head like Guardiola loves to.
Wolves
There is no refereeing conspiracy in the Premier League, but it is fundamentally funny that the one team pushing for VAR to be abolished is so frequently done over by such curious decisions.
