As of this writing, no one else had followed Spurs down the path of firing their manager yet this term. It seems likely that it will happen sooner rather than later. Week 13 brought ample reason for more than one club Board to make a move.
In my eyes, it’s hard to be too upset about West Ham losing this particular match. Spurs were always going to rebound and, frankly, they’re also more talented. You can take issue with their recent form overall as they’ve been without a league win since the September 22nd win over Manchester United. As they’ve continued to drop down the table, there is plenty of reason to be concerned.
Everton had, perhaps, the worst loss of the weekend dropping a 2-0 home decision to a Norwich side that had been cratering since their famous win over Manchester City. Their recent form hasn’t been nearly as dire as that of the Hammers with a win over Southampton and a draw with Spurs in their last three matches. Still, their place is tenuous sitting in 15th and showing no signs of steady improvement despite significant spending.
[[ad:athena]]
In theory, you’d think that Unai Emery and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer would join Mssrs. Pellegrini and Silva on the hot seat. After draws to far less talented sides over the weekend, Manchester United and Arsenal can’t possibly see their current projects as going in the right direction. Both draws come on the heels of mediocre play that sees them sitting at 9th and 8th in the table respectively. Of more concern is that, like Everton, things don’t seem to be going in the right direction.
Emery’s side seems to have regressed massively after showing signs of a turnaround last season that could have been built on if handled better. Solskjaer has been an abject disaster since the initial positive bounce immediately upon his appointment. Like his North London counterpart, the former Red Devil forward seems to have no real answers as to what to do next. No new formation. No new approach. Anyone sitting at a Board Room table and talking themselves into things turning themselves around is doing so purely out of ego’s sake because they had some part in appointing someone who clearly wasn’t the right person for the job.
I’m never eager to campaign for someone losing their job. Life is hard enough in the blinding spotlight of professional sports without someone with a column heaping on negativity when things aren’t going well. Still, there is a time when things just aren’t working out.
I don’t suspect that a change in manager is going to make much of a difference at either West Ham or Manchester United. The problems that are infecting those clubs are above the manager’s pay grade and until upper management gets fixed, things aren’t going to get appreciably better. Still, something needs to be done and moving on from managers who aren’t getting the job done seems like the most plausible move to get talented squads moving in the right direction.
Arsenal and Everton don’t seem to be quite as irredeemably broken. Both are struggling mightily compared to the level of talent on hand but the Board-level players in place don’t have the same track record of being actively bad at their part of the equation. That may have more to do with insufficient time to prove their incompetence, but it might be that they just haven’t put all of the right pieces in place quite yet. Regardless, it wouldn’t be at all difficult to see both clubs improve significantly with the right managerial appointment.
Who will go first? History tells us that it will likely go West Ham (very soon) then Everton (not long after the Hammers) then Arsenal (about three months after they should have if not longer) and then Manchester United (an entire year too late).
Oh, and if you’re wondering what I think of Spurs’ prospects after Week 1 of the Mourinho era, you’ll have to wait until later in the column for that.
The Title Race
Not too much to in the way of new information in Week 13. Both of the main contenders won. City showed the most by beating a game Chelsea side and doing so by playing a grittier match than we usually associate with a Pep Guardiola side. After going down a goal a lesser side might have capitulated to the youthful enthusiasm that the Blues showed for much of the first half. Instead, they regrouped, regained the lead, and then steadily became more dominant over the course of the second half.
The Big Surprise
I already mentioned Norwich City beating Everton 2-0 at Goodison Park but I did it from the Toffees’ point of view. Kudos to the Canaries for coming out of the International Break refreshed and ready to try to restart their survival campaign. The Canaries got back to the formula that served them well earlier in the season as they absorbed a possession advantage from their hosts and were clinical in front of the goal.
Perhaps even more surprising, they did it without Emi Buendía starting. Perhaps they realized that despite all of his guile and skill on the ball, they need the sort of athleticism on the wings that a pairing of Onel Hernández and Todd Cantwell can bring. I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a place for Buendia in a successful Norwich City side, he was a big part of their early success, just that there may be a time and place for a player who is something of a passenger when the other team has the ball. Not that passes intercepted are the end all and be all of defensive actions but Onel Hernández has only one fewer than Buendia despite having started eight fewer matches so far (for tackles won, Hernandez is at half Buendia’s total in fewer than a third of the starts). For a side that has been leaking goals, more defending from the top might be the key to getting back on the right track.
The Weekly Arsenal
Where to start? If you didn’t see this coming, I don’t know what you’ve been paying attention to. You look at the match-up on paper and it’s hard to imagine how a team with as much talent on it as Arsenal can drop points at home to a club with as little talent and as little current form as Southampton.
I’m not going to go on further about the managerial situation at Arsenal. I covered it above and many others have covered it in many other places. What I will say is that it is, yet again, proof that while most managers can’t regularly outperform the talent on hand, poor management can absolutely undermine whatever talent is on hand.
Unai Emery has now turned a bad situation, demoralizing Mesut Ozil last season and into this one, and doubled down on it by now insisting on starting him when he’s clearly not contributing anything. Do you give the guy a start in the league after his performance against Liverpool in the League Cup? Sure. Do you keep giving him more chances to disappoint after that first one didn’t go well? I can’t see why you would. You certainly don’t do it at the expense of a player like Nicolas Pepe who still has plenty of upside to be mined or someone like Joe Willock who has played well when given a chance.
Emery seems like he’s managing with risk mitigation in mind rather than winning. He must figure that if he loses playing the club’s highest paid player then he has plausible deniability if things don’t go well. A better, and more secure manager would play the player who gives the club the best chance to win and there’s no way to look at the matches against Wolves, Leicester City, and Southampton and suggest that Ozil is that choice.
My Other Favorites
Another week and the wins keep piling up for Wolves and Leicester City. The Foxes maintained their narrow lead on Manchester City to stay in second place with a dominant win over Brighton at the AmEx. It isn’t often that a visiting club doesn’t let up so much as a single shot on target on their travels. The obvious follow-up would be to say that it is even less frequent when a club outside of the “Big Six” does so. What you should take from that is that, despite the lack of accompanying revenue, Leicester City are very much among the elite this season. Manchester United, Arsenal, and even Spurs in a win will look on jealously at the ease with which the Foxes dispatched a bottom half side.
The Foxes have a ten point gap between themselves and fifth place. Given how we talk about Liverpool being prohibitive favorites for the title with an eight point gap over second place, it seems fair that we start talking about Leicester City as prohibitive favorites to be in the Champions League next season.
That gap between the Foxes and fifth place surprisingly finds Wolves at the other end of it. After struggling out of the gate, Nuno’s side have taken advantage of floundering big name clubs and rocketed up the table to sit just outside of the Champions League places. There is an admittedly big gap between Wolves and Chelsea with 26 points in fourth (and a narrow margin between them and Sheffield United and Burnley in 6th and 7th respectively) but given the poor start to the season, the ship has been righted much faster than expected. Wolves are back where we expected them to be when the season started, it’s just the company around them that is a little different than we might have thought.
Fantasy Ups and Downs
After each weekend, I’ll update players whose fantasy stock is up or down based on what we saw over the weekend.
Stock Down: David De Gea – Manchester United just aren’t very good. Fantasy goalkeepers earn their keep by either piling up clean sheets or making a lot of saves and, thus far, De Gea isn’t doing much of either. De Gea is middle of the pack in saves and has only two clean sheets to his name this season. Not good.
Stock Up: Kasper Schmeichel – Hands up to everyone who thought the Dane would be leading the league in clean sheets through 13 weeks.
Stock Down: Kyle Walker – Pep keeps mixing and matching trying to find a defensive group that works for him, the England man has sat out three of the past five City matches. A far cry from previous seasons when he was among the most productive outside backs in all of fantasy land.
Stock Up: James Tarkowski – 29 fantasy points, including a goal and two assists, over the past two matches feels like a half season for Tarkowski rather than just a pair of matches. I’d expect him to regress to being dependent on Burnley clean sheets but that’s still not a bad thing given how well the Clarets are playing right now.
Stock Down: Erik Pieters – After a sizzling start to the season Pieters has been dropped for Burnley’s past three matches. Given that the last two of those three matches have been 3-0 wins for the Clarets, it seems unlikely that Sean Dyche is going to mix things up anytime soon.
Stock Up: Serge Aurier – It always felt like Mauricio Pochettino played Aurier begrudgingly when he did play him. Enter José Mourinho with a strong preference for older players and it seems like Aurier has likely cemented a starting spot on the right side of the defense. Hard to see the Special One experimenting with bringing Kyle Walker-Peters along and living with his growing pains.
Stock Down: Phil Jones – Getting bullied off the ball by the wisp-like Lys Mousset with the end result being a goal for the opposition doesn’t speak highly for the chances of Phil Jones getting another chance in the line-up any time soon. Not a good look for your first opportunity to start in the league this season.
Stock Up: Phil Bardsley – All the negative stuff about Erik Pieters above, reverse it for Bardsley who has started the past two matches and picked up clean sheets in both. Unless Pieters has an undisclosed injury, it seems likely Bardsley will continue his run of starts.
Stock Down: Olivier Giroud – Down a goal and from the bench Michy Batshuayi is summoned rather than Giroud. If you’re in a draft league I might recommend picking Giroud up in the next few weeks ahead of a potential January move. Seems like exactly the right sort of solution for Crystal Palace.
Stock Up: Dele Alli – The odds-on favorite to see his stock increase with the arrival of José Mourinho and he delivered straight away with an assist and an overall more lively performance than what we’d seen so far this season.
Stock Down: Christen Eriksen – One guy who seems to have been ignored by the injection of life that came along with José Mourinho’s arrival at Tottenham Stadium. Maybe Mourinho will find a way to bring him back in but he certainly doesn’t fit the Mourinho mold so I wouldn’t count on it, especially if Alli and Son continue to look good in support of Harry Kane. Lucas Moura seems much more the all-action type that Mourinho prefers.
Stock Up: Ryan Fraser – Two assists in two weeks, it appears the wee winger is back.
Stock Down: Emi Buendía – He seemed like the one guy who couldn’t possibly be dropped from the Canaries’ midfield, until he was and they finally won. Correlation isn’t causation but it seems likely that the wide duo of Cantwell and Hernandez are going to get another chance at starting together.
Stock Up: Wilfried Zaha – Finally! His first goal of the season only took thirteen matches. Hopefully, for Zaha and Palace it will mark a boost in confidence and production.
Stock Down: Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang – He picked up an assist but the overall malaise at Arsenal seems to have impacted his play. It isn’t that he’s just been unlucky with some good scoring opportunities, it’s that he isn’t getting in those positions in the first place right now.
Stock Up: Raúl Jiménez – Five performances of 7 or more fantasy points in his last six Premier League matches, that’s pretty amazing stuff from a mid-priced forward.
Stock Up: Lys Mousset – He bounced back after an off week to make it four in five with six or more points. He’s legitimately on fire right now with his next six matches looking very much like a favorable run before Manchester City and Liverpool back to back on either side of New Years Day.
My Fantasy Fortunes
I’m back on the winning track in the League of Champions but everything else was an abject disaster and an abject disaster of the worst kind…the kind you can’t do anything about. I actually had a well-above-average fantasy week pretty much across the board. Unfortunately, it was one of those weeks where my opponents went well beyond above average and had exceptional weekends. Sometimes you have to throw your hands up in the air and just know that it wasn’t your week.
The Waiver Wire
As you start looking forward to the last match week before the international break, here are some thoughts on waiver priorities:
Goalkeepers – Aaron Ramsdale gets Watford at St Mary’s next Saturday in the late match and while I believe Watford are slowly making progress, I still don’t think they’re very good so getting shut out on their travels doesn’t seem unlikely, even if Southampton aren’t very good either.
Defenders – I mentioned Phil Bardsley above and I like him to continue starting and racking up clean sheets with Crystal Palace heading to Turf Moor next Saturday.
Midfielders – Todd Cantwell and Onel Hernández will both likely be in the Canaries side that hosts the sinking ship that is Arsenal Football Club. Even if Arsenal win, they won’t make it easy on themselves so expect at least two goals from the hosts with the two outside attackers good bets to be available and play some role in the scoring.
Forwards – Ashley Barnes is back among the goals with two in two after a long barren spell. The goals seem to come in bunches so diving back in seems like a wise move in a forward market without many options.
The Top Six
After watching a lot of matches this weekend, I’m feeling even better about the group that I rolled out last week. I don’t have a ton of faith that the revival at Spurs has long-term legs but they’ll get closer until they realize that “not Pochettino” doesn’t necessarily mean “better” and the honeymoon with Mourinho ends. You could talk me into them taking the sixth place spot but I like Wolves’ prospects far more than Spurs’ even with the change in management.
Liverpool
Manchester City
Leicester City
Chelsea
Wolves
Sheffield United
Relegation
I need to see it for more than one week from Norwich City before they’re out of the basement but their 2-0 away win is certainly promising as is the point that the Saints picked up at Arsenal. Still, I can’t see Everton or West Ham slipping into the relegation zone long-term.
Southampton
Watford
Norwich City
What’s Next?
First, we finish up Week 13 with Aston Villa and Newcastle squaring off shortly. Looking ahead to next weekend, there aren’t any marquee match-ups. Usually, that’s when the drama happens. With six or more (depending on your view of what constitutes “big”) high profile clashes of “big clubs”, there’s plenty of opportunity for an upset or two. My money is on Arsenal dropping more points at Norwich City and oft-linked midfielder John McGinn terrorizing the Red Devils at Old Trafford.
