1) What sort of team will Brendan Rodgers pick against Sunderland?
There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that this section won’t be another thing about Steven Gerrard’s place in the Liverpool team. The bad news is that, well, it will be a little bit about Steven Gerrard’s place in the Liverpool team. Even with a squad laden with not insignificant injury problems, Rodgers has shown a willingness to rotate his players depending on the more pressing needs of the team – or at least what he perceives to be the more pressing needs of the team. He of course dropped/rested half his side for the Champions League trip to Real Madrid with more winnable domestic encounters in mind, so one wonders if he will do the reverse for the visit of Sunderland this weekend. Important as the three league points are, next week’s visit of Basel surely trumps it. Liverpool need to beat the Swiss side on Tuesday to progress to the knockout stages, and having just played four games in nine days, it would surely make sense for Rodgers to give some of his key men a breather. And yes, that does include Gerrard (sorry), if only because the rest last weekend seemed to do the trick, helping the captain to a goal and decent performance against Leicester. If that theory extends to the whole side, Rodgers and Liverpool will be laughing.
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2) Newcastle in constant flux
Stability can be overrated, and indeed it’s such an alien concept at Newcastle that the place could go into some sort of shock if such a state descended over St James’s Park. Like a shark must keep constantly moving, so the Toon seemingly must be in perennial flux to keep on keeping on. At some point though, this state of hither and thither will stop being healthy and start being corrosive; after starting the season with a winless first seven games, then implausibly winning five in a row a few weeks ago, they are now in danger of going back to the pits of despair. Saturday’s game against the merciless juggernaut of Chelsea kicks off what could be a bleak December for Alan Pardew’s band of merry or miserable men, for after that they travel to Arsenal, then stay in London for their Capital One Cup quarter-final against Spurs, before league games against Sunderland, Manchester United and Everton. Indeed, you have to wait until 1 January for a game you might really expect them to win, but in that strange and remarkable run of success in October and November at least lies some hope; they did, after all, beat Manchester City and Liverpool. A little consistency is what they need, for the collective blood pressure of Tyneside, if nothing else.
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3) The injuries start biting for Southampton
Despite their blinding start to the season and lofty league position, Southampton’s campaign was never realistically going to be defined by this run of exceptionally tough games. They are of course not challengers for the league title, so even if they lose all of these games, including against Manchester United on Monday, they can still make a success of this season. More of a concern is the fitness of their relatively thin squad. That fine run was helped a huge amount by a lack of injuries, with players fit and able to make merry hay as they pleased, but now their players seem to be beating a hasty retreat to the physio’s room. Jack Cork, Dusan Tadic and Toby Alderweireld limped off at Arsenal, the spiritual home of the injury crisis on Wednesday, while Morgan Schneiderlin and James Ward-Prowse are also ailing. Suddenly, Ronald Koeman is looking down the ugly end of starting the entertainingly erratic Saido Mané and whichever collection of untested youngsters he can scoop from the Saints youth team. If nothing else, he’ll be able to go toe-to-toe with his old pal Louis van Gaal in an “injury list-off”.
And if that wasn’t enough, Koeman has to contend with the declining form of the driving force behind their superb start. Not only has Graziano Pellè not scored since the rout of Sunderland, he’s managed only two shots on target in the intervening five games: his wild attempt against Arsenal, launched high into the Merlot-sipping crowd with time, space, a nicely teed-up ball and a 22-year-old keeper making his second league start to shoot at, summed up his struggles nicely. He appears to be bereft of confidence, snatching at chances rather than dispatching them with a neatness rivalled only by his hair, as early in the campaign. Pellè was regarded as something of a joke in his homeland before he started hoofing in goals in the Netherlands, so the coming few weeks will tell us whether he is as good as he appeared in the optimistic days of autumn, or whether that was an Amr Zaki-esque hot streak at the start of his time in the Premier League.
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4) One last chance for Irvine?
| Pos | Team | P | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 | West Brom | 14 | -6 | 13 |
| 17 | Hull | 14 | -6 | 12 |
| 18 | Burnley | 14 | -12 | 12 |
| 19 | QPR | 14 | -13 | 11 |
| 20 | Leicester | 14 | -10 | 10 |
Before the round of midweek games, Barry Glendenning wondered whether Alan Irvine should be given more time at West Brom but after a fourth defeat on the spin and The Hawthorns crowd becoming increasingly unwilling to withhold their boo reflex, a burly bloke wearing a hood and carrying a scythe is looming. It’s not just the bad results that have been alarming for the Baggies, but the nature of the performances, often limply rolling over with no real hint of any inspiration. They at least managed to create a few opportunities against West Ham on Tuesday, but Irvine was stretching credibility when he tried to spin that as a positive after the game. “It was astonishing that we had so much of the play and spent the majority of the second half in their half if not in their final third and had countless attempts at goal but we didn’t score,” he said. When you take 22 shots and score only one goal it suggests a fundamental failing in a side who are heading only one way. Irvine’s appointment was a strange one in the first place, having failed with Sheffield Wednesday in League One in his previous managerial gig, but whether he deserves it or not another defeat when they face Hull on Saturday could well see him on his way, the first sacking in a season of unusual restraint from the chairmen of the Premier League.
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5) Leicester and the angry mob
One has a certain amount of sympathy for any player or manager who responds when abused by a baying mob. Quite why fans who scream abuse in language that would make a docker blush then get quite so precious when the target of their ire replies in kind is unclear. Nigel Pearson did this on Wednesday, apparently inviting a Leicester fan to depart the scene in the most robust possible terms when his management of their defeat to Liverpool was questioned by a fan. When a man who has brought success is given both barrels for losing to a team who, despite their struggles, nearly won the Premier League last season, you can hardly blame Pearson for returning fire.
Still, that Pearson did respond is probably an indication of the pressure he is under, and how tough life at the King Power Stadium is these days. Leicester haven’t won since that madcap 5-3 victory over Manchester United, when the September sun shone and a season of unexpected glory stretched out in front of them. The problems of attempting to negotiate a Premier League season with Championship players have been brutally exposed, most obviously when Wes Morgan capped a hapless performance by hauling Rickie Lambert to the ground and getting sent off. As a metaphor for his side’s woes, Morgan deciding that the only way he could stop noted speedster Lambert was to wrestle him off his feet is pretty handy. Luckily for them, Leicester face one of the few teams where, despite Aston Villa’s win over Crystal Palace, morale is at a comparable level this weekend.
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6) Will Sam Allardyce stick with Andy Carroll?
- Appearances
- 4
- Goals
- 0
- Shots
- 13
- Shots on target
- 31%
- Offsides
- 1
This season has seen Sam Allardyce hailed in the most unlikely quarters for his revolutionary tactic of not putting out a West Ham side who are ugly as sin to watch, but more impressively winning a load of games in the process. At the start of the season this was achieved without what many viewed as the symbol of Allardyce’s previous approach, Andy Carroll, who was ruled out with one of his assorted ailments, a new and genuinely innovative forward line of Diafra Sakho, Enner Valencia and Stewart Downing earning the plaudits instead. However, Carroll’s return to fitness coincided with injuries for Sakho and Valencia, meaning the big man has started West Ham’s past three games, two of which have ended in victory, so now Valencia and (possibly) Sakho are available again, which path will Allardyce choose for the visit of Swansea? Carroll’s form against the Swans shouldn’t be discounted (he scored the winner against them two seasons ago, and set up both of Kevin Nolan’s goals last term, before being sent off), but it’s also important to note, as Allardyce has, that Carroll is essentially still in his pre-season. It is, to wheel out the age-old managerial cliche, a “nice” problem for Allardyce to have, and is an indication of how far he’s advanced this term that he has options like this.
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7) This is the time for Arsenal to break their Stoke fear
In the last couple of seasons, Stoke have moved away from the physical blunderbuss of a side who would cause Arsenal’s collection of Carlos Kickaballs so very many problems, but that doesn’t mean Arsène Wenger’s record at the Britannia has really improved. Arsenal have won just once at Stoke’s home since they won promotion to the Premier League in 2008, the last defeat coming via a Jonathan Walters penalty as Arsenal’s title challenged fizzled out last season. However, this might be the year for Arsenal to break this curious mental fug that seems to descend when they enter Staffordshire, as Stoke’s home form seems to have disappeared. They’ve been better on the road so far, something of a reversal from the days when the noisy bowl of their home stadium would seem to blow teams away, their fans greeting every launched throw with the fervour of a mob baying for the blood of a gladiator. The Gunners’ last couple of games have resulted in scrappy and unconvincing wins against (theoretically) inferior sides, which could be spun as more evidence of their underperformance, but if Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United had done similar, then the phrase “the mark of champions” would be tossed liberally around. This Arsenal side do not have the mark of champions but their spirit in the past two games does at least suggest a side capable of jumping this particular psychological hurdle.
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8) Different expectations, the same aim
That sound you may have heard coming from Lancashire on Tuesday evening was Burnley, with their point against Newcastle, fairly streaking past the all-time Premier League worst points record, putting clear water between them and the historically awful 2007-08 Derby side. More than that, the 1-1 draw was their fourth game without defeat, which officially qualifies as a streak, something that barely looked possible as they were trudging to defeat after defeat. Things are looking up for a side who everyone expected – and probably still expects – to go down. Not quite so QPR, back in the bottom three after a defeat to Swansea that was a shade more comprehensive than the 2-0 scoreline suggested. “Everyone down there has done a great job,” said Harry Redknapp in the week, including himself in the group of managers in the Premier League’s nether regions who have managed to avoid the sack. Expectations are different at Burnley and QPR, with one side hoping to avoid relegation and the other expecting it, but Saturday’s encounter could go some way to determining which, if either, team might survive.
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9) Can Tottenham get back their ‘good feeling’?
All the talk after Tottenham’s win over Everton at the weekend was of a turning point, a win that would galvanise them for the rest of the campaign and jolt them from the funk of the season so far. “This was important game for us,” said Mauricio Pochettino. “The result was important and the performance very good … Our mentality and spirit was fantastic. We need to keep this feeling. It’s impossible to always win but with this spirit and mentality it’s easier to arrive in position to win the game. It’s not only three points, it’s a little bit more. We broke a bad run of results. It was important to get this victory.”
Initially it looked like they would continue that into their encounter with Chelsea on Wednesday, swarming all over their opponents for the first 10 minutes or so, before the universe righted itself, everyone stopped looking into apocalypse insurance and Chelsea slapped them down, as they have for the last quarter of a century at Stamford Bridge. So expected is a Spurs defeat at Chelsea they could almost write it off and not allow such a defeat to harsh their Everton buzz, but there is of course a danger it could kill any sort of feelgood factor before it had chance to take any effect. At home to Crystal Palace, we will perhaps discover whether their annual hiding at Chelsea has knocked Tottenham off course.
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10) Will Manuel Pellegrini recall Eliaquim Mangala?
In her match report of Manchester City’s win over Sunderland on Wednesday, Louise Taylor wrote: “Yet good as City were, sporadic cameos indicated why Dedryck Boyata and Martín Demichelis are not Pellegrini’s first-choice central defensive combination and Fernandinho was forced to clear Rodwell’s header off the line following Larsson’s excellent corner.” As shaky as Boyata may have been at the Stadium of Light, it’s difficult to imagine he’s a significantly less secure presence than Mangala, so clumsy and such a disciplinary liability is the eye-wateringly expensive Frenchman. With Vincent Kompany out for a little while and Demichelis looking comparatively secure, Pellegrini must choose between Mangala – back from suspension after his two fabulously oafish yellow cards against Southampton – and Boyata, which at the moment is a little like being asked if you’d rather be punched in the face or the groin. An alternative would be to play Bacary Sagna in the middle but if the manager was going to take that option he would have done so against Sunderland. Presumably he’ll take a deep breath and select the least damaging option from those available to him. Given that, against Everton, one of these two will have to keep an eye on Romelu Lukaku, Pellegrini would be forgiven for watching the game from behind a sofa.
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