Manchester City running riot, Dele Alli is ‘that type of player’, and while the bottom clubs are bad, Swansea are worse… this weekend’s Premier League round-up
ANOTHER weekend where Manchester City register yet another victory, Manchester United bored their way to three more dull points and where Brighton failed to score.
It was also a weekend where Crystal Palace not only scored away from home for the first time but won as well and David Moyes staked his claim for Manager of the Year.
As Alex Ferguson might say: Football eh, bloody hell…
OBLIGATORY STORY ABOUT HOW GOOD CITY ARE…
As the world’s media scour their dictionaries for any superlatives they haven’t yet used to describe Manchester City this season, we’ll instead point you to a statistic that really shows just how dominant they are.
Pep’s princes have now faced all of England’s Champions League representatives this term and they have not only won all of the meetings but they’ve done so by an aggregate score of 12 goals to two.
Just give them the title now.
THE OTHER HALF…
For all of Manchester City’s dominance, it worth looking at the bottom half of the table where, let’s face it, everyone is as just rubbish as each other.
Apart from Swansea, obviously. They’re worse.
There’s now just four points between 12th and 19th place and any one of those teams could go down the way they’re all playing at the moment.
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I suspect that most of the teams down there are simply banking on there being three worse teams than them come the end of the season.
Well, two after Swansea.
WHICH LEADS US NICELY ON TO…
One of those teams, given their current form, must be Newcastle United.
Their defeat to Arsenal at the Emirates was their eighth in their last nine league games and finally took them into the relegation zone.
What made the defeat all the more painful was that they never really looked like making any kind of game of it.
Magpies manager Rafa Benitez says they need to spend big in the January transfer window to keep them in the Premier League but with a takeover in the offing, will Mike Ashley will get his sausage fingers in his deep pockets.
Maybe he will, but only to pop into Greggs for lunch.
NOT ON YOUR DELE
Though he’s clearly one of the mot gifted young English footballers in recent years, we keep seeing the nasty side of Dele Alli, don’t we?
But Alli, being English, "isn’t that sort of player", is he?
No, you suspect he’d only be that sort of player if he was foreign.
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REF JUSTICE
Like most things in this country, we have a habit of thinking we have the very best in the world when it comes to referees and, as usual, we are wrong.
This weekend’s games showed referees at their very worst.
At Brighton, the Seagulls’ Glenn Murray was assaulted by Burnley’s James Tarkowski who blatantly elbowed him in the stomach without censure from referee Chris Kavanagh.
Meanwhile it was all going off at the Etihad with Harry Kane’s two-footer on Raheem Sterling, Nicolas Otamendi’s boot in Kane’s face and, worst of all, Alli’s ugly stamp on Kevin De Bruyne -
all not warranting the red cards they deserved from Craig Pawson.
They say that nobody likes to see a game ruined by a red card but sometimes you wonder which game the refs are watching.
RED ALERT
Liverpool were at their frightening best again this weekend as they demolished Bournemouth at the Vitality Stadium.
Everyone from the fans to the pundits were in complete agreement that Jurgen Klopp’s team are an awesome attacking force when they’re hitting their straps.
Just one small thing.
They’re still 18 points adrift of Manchester City.
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HAPPY FEET
Talking of Kevin De Bruyne, Martin Keown said that the Belgian playmaker had “feet like paint brushes” on MOTD at the weekend.
Unlike Keown, of course, who had feet like bog brushes.