Premier League winners and losers

Winners

Manchester City and Pep Guardiola
You must go and read 16 conclusion if you have not done so yet, but Sunday praise does not stop Manchester City from topping the winners on Monday. How could it when City are now the champions elect with less than half of the season played.

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In only two Premier League seasons has a team won the title by a greater points margin than the one Manchester City currently hold over second place, and could you really back Pep Guardiola’s team being hauled back at all from this point onwards? My favourite statistic is that City have already collected enough points to finish eighth in last season’s Premier League.

Over-achievement can easily and quickly become normalised. We now expect City to win every game so that when they falter it is sold as disappointment and when they win again we take it in our stride. Yet this run is unprecedented. The highest ever points total was achieved By Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea in 2004/05, a team that pulverised the Premier League. Continue as they are, and Guardiola’s City will beat that by 14 points. We are witnessing a new bar being set for Premier League performance.

 

Sam Allardyce
A smile as wide as the Mersey as his team eked out a point from a match in which they barely deserved none. But having watched Liverpool sweep aside all and sundry in recent weeks, you cannot blame Allardyce for digging in and doing what he does best. When your back is against the wall, the end result rules all. Welcome to the good ship Big Sam..

 

Huddersfield Town
Our early winner Had Huddersfield lost at home to Brighton to record a fifth successive Premier League defeat, they would have dropped to 16th in the Premier League and been only two points above the relegation zone despite a highly promising start to the season. As it is, David Wagner’s side are back in mid-table, and seven of their next nine home league opponents are Stoke, Burnley, West Ham, Bournemouth, Watford, Swansea and Crystal Palace.

 

Wilfried Bony
Scorer in consecutive Premier League games for the first time since December 2014 for Swansea against West Ham and Tottenham. Since then, Bony has left Swansea for Manchester City, played in two major international tournaments, moved on loan to Stoke City and then rejoined Swansea again. Fair to say it was overdue.

 

Claude Puel and perception
How quickly a reputation can change, and proof that a manager is so often reliant on the proficiency of his players. Claude Puel is persona grata again.

At Southampton, Puel earned a reputation for dismal attacking football, critics pointing to a poor record of goals scored. Yet Puel suffered because of the underperformance of Southampton’s strikers. That is not to say that there were not issues with Puel’s style, nor that he should not share part of the blame, but those selected to take chances and score goals failed to do so.

In Leicester’s seven matches under Puel, they have scored at a rate of 1.6 per game. Last season under Puel, Southampton scored at a rate of 1.1 per game, a clear difference. Yet dig down a little more, and the results are surprising.

In 2016/17, Southampton created chances and took shots at a rate of 10.4 and 14.5 per game. Under Puel in the last seven games, Leicester have created chances and taken shots at a rate of 7.8 and 9.7 per game, a comfortably worse rate. The difference is that Leicester’s shot conversion rate over that period is 20.8%. Last season, Southampton’s shot conversion rate was 10.1%.

That can be sold in two ways. Either you say that Puel is not a better coach than at Southampton, more that he has got lucky with Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez (although it’s worth pointing that both are performing better than they were under Craig Shakespeare). It would be more accurate (particularly given the struggles of Mauricio Pellegrino) is to say that no manager could deal with the abysmal shooting that Southampton produced last season. Under Pellegrino the shot accuracy has improved only marginally, still under 11%.

Away from Southampton, Puel is flourishing again, albeit in a short sample size. Since arriving at the King Power, only Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United and Burnley have taken more points than Leicester.

 

Heung-Min Son, and a change in Tottenham formation?
It sounds a little tenuous at first, but Heung-Min Son is only in the Tottenham team because of the injury sustained by Toby Alderweireld. It led to Mauricio Pochettino switching back to a four-man defence that creates the extra midfield role. In Tottenham’s usual 3-4-2-1, the front three places are reserved for Dele Alli, Christian Eriksen and Harry Kane. Son’s only hope is to be an impact substitute or start as a wing-back.

Yet Son is arguably Tottenham’s most in-form player, instrumental against Liverpool, the match-winner against Crystal Palace and Borussia Dortmund and a goalscorer in each of Spurs’ last three matches. Against Stoke on Saturday, he was irresistible  on the left of a 4-2-3-1 formation, comfortable interchanging positions with Eriksen and Alli. Son is the perfect teacher’s pet, hard-working and constantly willing despite never being a fixture in the first team.

In fact, Son’s form gives Pochettino something to think about. The assumption is that Alderweireld’s return will see Tottenham switch back to a three-man central defence, but that leaves the manager with a selection headache. Can you really argue that Alli is offering more to this team than Son on current form? The alternative is to stick with the central defensive pair and rotate Alderweireld, Jan Vertonghen and Davinson Sanchez.

 

Burnley’s defence
A list of teams in the Premier League with more clean sheets than Burnley this season:
Manchester United

Burnley’s defence against Watford on Saturday:
Nick Pope, Phil Bardsley, Kevin Long, James Tarkowski, Stephen Ward

 

Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg
Hojbjerg has struggled since joining Southampton from Bayern Munich, and came close to leaving Southampton in the summer. Yet against Arsenal the 22-year-old produced a display in central midfield of superb quality, and was understandably picked as the game’s best player

 
David Moyes
Moyes played down expectation by turning to the issue of facing Arsenal in midweek, but there was no hiding his delight at beating Chelsea and winning his first Premier League game in far too long. Very few of us saw a victory for the downbeat Moyes, but the meagre fare at the bottom of the Premier League means that a few more like it will soon see West Ham head clear of the bottom three. Then suddenly Moyes is a proper Premier League manager again.

 

Paul Clement
A win to keep the wolf from the door. It might not have been pretty, but aesthetics were abandoned a long time ago in this attempt at survival. The fear is that there will need to be better days even that this if Clement is to keep his job and Swansea City are to stay up.

 

Mohamed Salah
He now has to score more than one brilliant goal to get more than a single line. See what you’ve done, Mo?