Premier League games

There's a World Cup in a minute. Which is both mad and also puts any struggling Premier League manager under even greater pressure...

Our view then was that the more conspicuous bed-shittings going on elsewhere had allowed Howe and Newcastle to fly a bit under the radar despite spending vast amounts of money on drawing a load of games and sitting pointlessly in mid-table. If you were to tell a Spurs fan in July that approaching the World Cup break their team would be third in the Premier League and win their Champions League group stage, that Spurs fan would have been delighted and imagine that their team must be playing really quite well. They’re seventh in the league, above Liverpool and just a couple of points behind Chelsea, and have been as fun to watch as anyone. Fulham are rollicking good fun this season, Aleksandar Mitrovic has worked it all out and the signs are clear that they are going to go toe-to-toe with absolutely anyone and everyone this season. The six-game unbeaten run that started O’Neil’s Premier League management career was an unlikely and joyous thing and even after the run of defeats (which conspicuously contains zero 9-0 thrashings) they’re still right there in the mass of lower mid-table clubs; only five points separates the top half from the bottom three, and the Cherries are right in the middle of that pack. That might well be the entirety of his Premier League managerial career, and the effort to render it into a literal imagining of the Gennaro Gattuso ‘sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit’ meme should be applauded. Of course, the third option we didn’t mention at the start is that he is in fact doing fine and our own desire for the tabloids and Lampard to be wrong has clouded our judgement. Could yet get sucked right back into trouble because the bottom half of the Premier League is ferociously tight this season, but the darkest days of five defeats in the first seven games of the season do appear to be behind Moyes and his team. Pleasantly surprised to see how high he was in the last rankings, but real talk: he would have got a lot lower had another update been done at any time in the last few weeks before Leeds went and pulled Liverpool’s pants down so magnificently at Anfield last weekend. It was clearly premature and has had the knock-on effect of bollocksing Brighton about which is annoying, but it wasn’t a good start to the season by any reasonable measure. The muscle memory of a champion team occasionally allows them to do things like go toe-to-toe with Manchester City and win but they look broken, their aura is gone and the once impregnable defence is starting to look distinctly brittle now the midfield is no longer controlling games as it once did. He’s still there, which is pretty damn incredible really and probably still owes more to the financial implications of sacking and replacing him than any lingering belief that this is going to work.