Problem-solving Liverpool top Premier League winners as Arsenal are worst 5-0 victors

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A lot of the winners nevertheless get a kicking in a slightly more bitesize Winners and Losers than usual after a weekend featuring terrible 5-0 wins and a baffing redemption narrative.

Winners

Liverpool

The Premier League’s elite problem-solvers. They have come up with answers to absolutely everything asked of them this season, apart from the solution to being reduced to nine men and having a goal disallowed because the VAR lads weren’t paying attention. And to be fair, they still came within seconds and one ill-judged Joel Matip swipe of solving even that particularly ridiculous puzzle in what remains their only domestic defeat of a campaign where everyone else has already lost at least three times in the league alone.

Man City are still by far the likeliest winners of this league, but if there’s one team they’d rather not be showing this level of resilience then it’s Liverpool.

Diogo Jota

Taking up the Mo Salah slack is a frankly unfair ask of any player. But two smartly taken goals and a clever assist puts Jota’s performance at Bournemouth in very Salah areas.

READ: Liverpool man puts Darwin Nunez to shame in Premier League best finishers list

Conor Bradley

Taking up the Trent Alexander-Arnold slack is a frankly unfair etc. and so on. The Liverpool youngster was brilliant at Bournemouth as the Reds – well, Green and Whites – handled the absence of their two most significant progressive players with frankly indecent ease.

Darwin Nunez

You know it’s going well for Liverpool when Darwin starts producing clinical finishes to go with his all-round chaos stylings. Another Liverpool player who was simply too hot to handle in the second-half evisceration of Bournemouth, providing further evidence of the potentially exciting golden spell for Premier League chaos merchants. Richarlison has six goals in his last six games, Darwin’s back among the goals and…

Darwin Nunez-lite

…Ben Brereton Diaz marked his first Sheffield United start with a goal among all manner of lovely nonsense against West Ham. Blackburn fans will tell you just now giddy a Brereton Diaz hot streak can get. Sheffield United desperately needed a game-changer and might have one here. The fact there’s a roughly equal chance he gets another 10 Premier League goals or this is his last is what makes it so intoxicating. Sheffield United have bought themselves a Darwin Nunez on Temu and might just have lucked out.

Arsenal

Can you have a bad 5-0 win? Not really, but as 5-0 wins go, this wasn’t a particularly good one. The problem with creating and converting open-play chances remains, the lack of a goalscorer remains, and a result like this one in any case creates inevitable frustrations when it comes on the back of the damaging defeats Arsenal have suffered in recent weeks. Could really have done with some of these goals against West Ham, Fulham and Liverpool to be honest.

Even our resident Arsenal fan Jason Soutar was a bit puzzled by it all.

But it’s still a 5-0 win, isn’t it? And those are generally considered good news. Those defeats have gone and can’t be changed, it only helps to look forward and that’s easier done on the back of a 5-0 win than another afternoon of being frustrated and denied.

And perhaps Declan Rice turning out to be an elite corner-taker is the big twist this season’s been waiting for.

The Wrong Gabriels

It would undoubtedly have helped the narrative around Arsenal, though, if Jesus rather than Margalhaes and in those weird closing moments Martinelli had been the Gabriel on the scoresheet. You’d think that would be enough of us pulling people and teams apart in the ‘winners’ section, but we’re about to get to Brentford, so, you know. Still a bit more of it.

Brentford

A club that had very much stumbled into a situation where three points trumps everything and the feelgood atmosphere that returned to the club with Ivan Toney was welcome and already things feel very different to the ‘whisper it, but…’ relegation chat was starting to swirl up during a run of seven defeats in eight games.

A chaotic home win over Nottingham Forest isn’t quite compelling evidence that all is now well, but with a trip to Tottenham and a visit from Manchester City to come in the next two games Toney’s Grand Comeback absolutely did need to be accompanied by three points as well as a genuinely quite baffling air of redemption.

Ivan Toney

It was all a bit weird, wasn’t it? The hero’s welcome for the return of a player who got himself banned by failing to follow the very, very clear rules that are explained to all footballers about not gambling on football? If it was just about understandable from Brentford themselves to be giddy about the return of a legitimately elite striker to a team in urgent and desperate need of his skills, it was quite another to see the broadcasters falling over themselves to hail the returning hero.

Jamie Carragher’s assertion that he was always going to give Toney man of the match whatever happened was surely hyperbole but no less weird for that, and the discovery during the post-match interviews that Toney is a ‘manifesting’ guy is also a troubling one. You’d think he’d have manifested himself some winning bets. Mind, you probably end up with your accounts restricted for that kind of caper. Which might be for the best in his case.

It’s undoubtedly easy to have some sympathy for Toney, a minor symptom rather than any kind of cause of English football’s gambling issue, but he’s still a professional footballer who did something really stupid and avoidable rather than someone returning from serious injury, illness or other trauma. The whole tone of the weekend’s coverage felt off.

But let’s not lose focus of just why his return is such a big deal. He’s a bombshell to the relegation fight. Nobody else in that fight has anything like him, and on early evidence Brentford need worry little about ring-rust affecting the early stages of his return to action after eight long months out.

A goal, a win, and a PGMOL sh*tstorm now well under way about moving some vanishing foam. Whatever your views on why he’s been away, or the coverage of his return, it’s hard to argue the Barclays isn’t a better and more entertaining place now he’s back.

It’s always good for the competition and the soul whenever one of the division’s best and most effective players is operating outside its elite clubs, so our one further wish is that Toney not spoil everything by manifesting a move to Arsenal or Chelsea over the next 10 days, please.

Injury Time

There’s more of it these days, isn’t there? And we’re not supposed to call it injury time, are we? We’re supposed to call it added time. Or stoppage time. Because If you call it injury time these days, you’ll be arrested and thrown in jail. These days.

But it’s also great. The old lazy days of one minute at the end of the first half and three at the end of the second are long gone, with something approaching the requisite added time to make up for the delays that have occurred now a long overdue standard. It was one of the best things about the otherwise assortedly problematic Qatar World Cup, and it’s now one of the best things about Our League. And not just because it’s fairer, even though it obviously is. But because it’s leading to absolute nonsense, and we live for drama.

Spurs have already managed to win a game they were losing at 90 minutes and lose one they were leading at 90 minutes this season, while almost every week there seems to be at least one game that springs absurdly to life in those chaotic post-90 moments. It’s like everyone collectively loses the run of themselves once injury time kicks in. There’s suddenly a real Friday afternoon looseness to proceedings. We’re not on the clock now, lads. Let’s go mental.

This weekend, one player – never mind team – managed to score twice in stoppage time and that wasn’t even the mad one. That honour goes not to Gabriel Martinelli but instead to everyone involved with the ludicrous finish at Bramall Lane, in which Rhian Brewster got sent off after VAR review for a naughty challenge, Vladimir Coufal picked up a yellow card for as it turned out correctly pointing out to the ref that his initial yellow card for that foul was an error and then another yellow card for a foul that would lead to a free-kick from which Sheffield United would be awarded a penalty, which would be delayed by several minutes because Alphonse Arbeloa had injured himself conceding said penalty, Oli McBurnie scoring the penalty after an expert Blades deployment of a fake taker, and then there still being time for West Ham to be denied what probably should have been an even later penalty of their own at the other end.

Magnificent stuff, and most importantly all ending up with a 2-2 draw that doesn’t help either side’s prospects for the season as a whole. That’s what we all like to see.

Losers

Nottingham Forest

A damaging, progress-checking defeat in a game from which they really should have emerged from something, and that compounded by a dignity-shedding exercise whereby a club currently under charges for breaking spending rules has become vexed to the point of penning a strongly-worded letter – i.e. the most vexed it is possible for people in England to ever be – about far more important rules, namely those surrounding the placement and movement of some disappearing foam.

It’s easy and correct to laugh at a team trying to blame anyone else for its misfortunes after a game in which they’ve literally conceded a winning goal to Neal Maupay, and even easier when it’s about something as intrinsically amusing as some housery with some foam. But it’s also just the latest bit of tiresome blame-shifting, official-blaming posturing from a club after a defeat. We all know who started it – and luckily Gary Neville has said it to save us doing so, so you can target your abuse in his direction – but nobody should kid themselves their club would be above such nonsense.

It’s got to stop. It really isn’t helping anyone.

Crystal Palace

If Arsenal’s 5-0 win was the worst one ever, then it logically follows that Palace’s 5-0 defeat was the best one ever. It’s not much consolation, is it?

There genuinely were quite impressive elements to Palace’s play. That they restricted Arsenal’s threat largely to set-piece and counter-attacks and pressed them impressively high up the pitch is worth noting. Alas, it does also need noting that Arsenal generally played through that press straightforwardly enough and Palace’s defending of said set-piece and counter-attack threats was abysmal.

Overall, it was a combination of performance and result that could be written off at a club in a happier overall frame of mind. There was undoubtedly an element of freakery to the scale of the defeat and it really was largely One Of Those Things.

The problem for Palace and Roy Hodgson is that the overall mood at the club is currently pretty bloody bleak and it doesn’t really matter if a 5-0 defeat has all the mitigation in the world when it’s a result that makes it one win in 12 games in all competitions for a club that appears to be wasting opportunities on and off the pitch right now.

Roy Hodgson

Now, inevitably, an overwhelming odds-on favourite in the sack race. Leave it, Ivan.

West Ham

Absolutely a draw that felt like a defeat as the Hammers conceded sloppily at the end of both halves at Sheffield United. To lead twice and fail to win against a team firmly bottom of the league was beyond careless and while the overall state of the Hammers’ season remains enormously healthy it will sting to have missed so gilt-edged a chance to move within three points of Spurs in what may well prove to be a Champions League-securing fifth spot.

Bournemouth

Victims to an extent of fixture computer vagaries and the quasi-winter break that leaves everyone suddenly only playing two Premier League games in three weeks after playing about 83 in the previous fortnight. Two mitigation-loaded defeats to Spurs and Liverpool are hardly season-wreckers but they’ve sapped away all that momentum built up across a fine run in November and December.

And a demonstrably in-form team whose only defeats in 13 all-competition games since October 21 have come against Liverpool, Man City or Tottenham will now nevertheless face the prospect of a tricky trip to West Ham next week somehow in the position of searching for a first Premier League win or even point in over a month.