Week 3 and we have had our first evidence that there are serious cracks within the big six. A full half of the elite teams in the Premier League lost over the weekend and only one, Arsenal, had the excuse of playing another member of the oligopoly at the top of the league. In losing to Crystal Palace and Newcastle respectively, Manchester United and Tottenham were exposed to an extent. It is always easy to write off the occasional slip up as “just one of those days” as City’s draw with Spurs seemed to be last weekend, the advantage in terms of attempts was there, the goals just didn’t go in. We’ll look at both losses to see if there’s anything bigger to read into the stumbles.
Manchester United came into the season with significant worries after a turbulent summer of big moves and significant players either leaving or seemingly wanting to leave. They made three acquisitions but the narrative was always that the summer was a failure because they didn’t get a marquee attacking name like Fernandes or Dybala. Throw in Lukaku leaving and Pogba wanting to leave, and regardless of the reality, the perception coming into Week 1 was that things were in significant disarray.
A Week 1 blowout win over Chelsea quieted the critics briefly but a draw in Week 2 and now a loss in Week 3 and the questions will surely start to arise again. Is David De Gea playing poorly because he’s unsettled about his long-term future (we don’t go much more than 24 hours without hearing about his contract extension still being unsigned)? Is the defense just taking a little time to come together or are the expensive parts assembled not worth their respective prices (Harry Maguire was barely in the picture when Ayew scored)? Will they ever make another penalty?
Frankly, it is that last item that would give me optimism if I were a United supporter (or a fantasy manager looking for reasons to be positive about my investments in Red Devils players). Penalty misses happen. Maybe not to Luka Milivojevic or James Milner but to most players and teams. You could argue that United should have had two cracks from the spot against Palace and, if they’d made both, they would have won. If they’d converted against Wolves, that would make it three in three and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Sometimes the little things go against you and those little things influence the final outcome of one or more matches. Absent the drama over the summer, a few unfortunate incidents probably don’t build into “Manchester United in shambles”. Only the weight of post-Sir Alex history has us where we are in that respect. That weight isn’t to be entirely ignored because it will likely breed stories that everyone has to react to and uncomfortable discussions inside the locker room about who is taking penalties. Still, I’m probably less worried about Manchester United now than I was at the beginning of the season, not more.
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The same can’t be said for Spurs. If we look at the trends at White Hart Lane, it is the big point at the Etihad that appears to be the mirage more so than the events around it now that we have three data points. Because Spurs made two big acquisitions over the summer after two straight barren transfer windows, the discussion of their summer was largely positive. I have to say, I feel a little differently about it. It feels like real cracks are showing.
The Aston Villa match saw Spurs struggle mightily until Christen Eriksen was introduced. From there they were dominant and came back for the win. Week 2 saw the Dane start and Spurs nick a point at City. Week 3 saw Eriksen on the bench from the outset and then, when he was introduced, he didn’t make nearly the same difference and the result was a 1-0 loss to a Newcastle team that had been beaten by Arsenal and taken apart by Norwich City in Weeks 1 and 2. We’re now at a point where Spurs have played more poor minutes out of their 270 than good ones. If you factor in that Expected Goals (xG) calculations had Manchester City beating Spurs 3-0 at the Etihad then the picture gets even less attractive. We’re left with about 30 minutes of good football in their first 270 and uncertainty about the future of the player who was the catalyst for those good 30 minutes.
Beyond the surface level, there are other cracks showing as well. Spurs, a bastion of quality and depth at the outside back spots in recent years, are looking perilously thin on both sides. Serge Aurier is persona non grata despite technically still being a Tottenham player. Danny Rose has started all three matches despite being told to find a new place to play while Spurs were on their summer tour. Kyle Walker-Peters, a promising player who would make a ton of sense as the junior member of a right back job-share, appears to be the only option at right back and he went down today with a hamstring injury. Maybe Foyth comes in eventually and deputizes as a right back but he’s a center back and not expected back until the end of September.
On the left, Ben Davies has struggled for form and fitness for more than a year and Ryan Sessegnon will certainly take time to be educated in the Spurs system after questionable performances for Fulham last season when asked to play a defensive role rather than as an out-and-out winger.
The center of the defense isn’t much better off with Vertonghen exiled while Alderweireld and Lloris have both taken the half-step back that you’d expect as players age. Davinson Sánchez doesn’t appear to be up to the standard of Alderweireld/Vertonghen at their peak.
If Eriksen ends up leaving, Spurs certainly have attacking midfielders with Son, Alli, Moura, Lamela and Lo Celso all remaining but none feel like they’ll provide a fulcrum for the attack the way the Dane does. Those players, with the possible exception of Lo Celso, are best suited to be on the ends of Eriksen passes rather than trying to make them. Perhaps Lo Celso is the heir apparent but even Mauricio Pochettino has said not to expect too much from the young Argentine too early.
The concern then, is that there are now a lot of things that could go wrong for Spurs. I’m not suggesting that they necessarily WILL go wrong but that this is the first season in a few where I felt like the smart money would be on Spurs taking a step back rather than a step forward.
The Title Race
Not a great deal to take from Week 3 if you’re looking at the long-term prospects for the title race. Liverpool clearing their first big six hurdle isn’t exactly nothing but I don’t think there were too many people thinking that this Arsenal side, even if they are significantly improved from last season, were ready to go to Anfield and get a result. Maybe if the fixture had happened in October or November but not yet.
If you are looking for some insight into which side is more likely to slip up next, perhaps play the same “what if” game we played with the small margins that has cost Manchester United points and apply them to Liverpool. If you squint really hard you can see an outcome where Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s chip from Adrián’s poor clearance goes in and is followed by Pepe doing better with his breakaway shot that he ended up putting into the goalkeeper’s gut after doing the hard work of breaking Virgil Van Dijk’s streak of not letting anyone dribble past him. If the match is 2-0 to Arsenal you can see the rest of the match playing out the way it did and it ending in a 3-3 draw.
Again, I’m not suggesting that Arsenal (we’ll get to them in a couple of sections) were the better team or even close to deserving of a point but you can see cracks in the Liverpool defense that weren’t there last season when they were racking up clean sheets for fun.
The Big Surprise
This was a weekend of surprising outcomes and I’ve already written about Spurs and Manchester United losing so I’m going to focus on how surprising it was to see Norwich City go punch for punch with Chelsea in a wildly entertaining match. The Canaries didn’t get a result but that they caused the Blues so many problems and scored twice without the benefit of a lucky bounce or a terrible defensive error was a pleasant surprise. Fantasy managers and neutrals are likely to be entertained by the Canaries all season. They appear to be an emerging version of what Southampton and Swansea were earlier in the decade. A club that understands the limits of their resources and has formulated a plan to be competitive despite those limitations.
The Weekly Arsenal
So much to talk about after the 3-1 loss at Anfield. It starts with Unai Emery’s starting line-up and his refusal to try to go toe-to-toe with the hosts. Given their talent and cohesion, I can’t say I blame him entirely but what I can blame him for is starting off with a defense-first approach and then not changing up the mix sooner when it was clear that Liverpool were doing just about anything they wanted to down the flanks in acres of space. Especially after going down a goal with the Reds attacking at will through Robertson and Alexander-Arnold, bringing in Lacazette and forcing the defense to deal with a target man and two super-quick wingers seemed like it could have alleviated a lot of pressure. So too, the notion of abandoning the preference to play it out of the back and going route one to Lacazette to let him hold the ball up for Pepe and Aubameyang. The approach wasn’t my favorite from the start but it was downright infuriating after going down a goal and watching how the first half unfolded overall.
All that said, the expectation that Arsenal were going to Anfield and taking a point or three was always going to be a difficult proposition. These are the reigning European champions. They are more talented than Arsenal. They are healthier than Arsenal. This set of players have been playing together longer than Arsenal’s group. They were playing at home. The expected outcome was a Liverpool win. That Arsenal didn’t produce a different outcome is not surprising. What we saw from Spurs at the Etihad last weekend was about the best that Arsenal could have hoped for and Liverpool weren’t as profligate with their opportunities as City were last weekend.
Next weekend against a wounded Spurs side will be the real test in my eyes. Win that, end the first four weeks with nine points and one of two most difficult fixtures on the schedule behind them and three starting defenders coming into the starting line-up in short order then the first month of the season will have been a success. Lay an egg against their North London rivals and then be prepared for valid criticism.
My Other Favorites
Leicester City did what they were supposed to do in beating Sheffield United. 2-1 seems like a scoreline we should get used to from the Foxes. The defense isn’t quite as good as last season and they weren’t a lockdown unit then either. The attack, though, started to look more like itself. Jamie Vardy did Jamie Vardy things (he was offside a bunch of times before eventually timing the run correctly and getting on to a nice pass from James Maddison) and the new feature of the Foxes squad, increased attacking depth, paid dividends when Harvey Barnes came on and won it with a screamer of a volley.
Wolves, on the other hand, have me a little bit worried. You look at the individual players they have an they’re all above average players in the context of the Premier League. The problem as I continue to watch more and more of their matches, is that they don’t have that one element to bring it all together. They play with three central midfielders and rather than having one who is predominantly a holding player, one who moves from box-to-box and one who primarily facilitates the attack they seem to have two holders and a box-to-box player in their preferred starting line-up.
The reason that this works at a better than average rate against bigger clubs is that it provides the advantages of “parking the bus” by having numbers in central midfield while featuring midfielders adept at releasing counterattacking players from deep.
When facing teams like Burnley who are themselves parking the bus, Wolves don’t have that creative player – the Maddison, the Sigurdsson, the Eriksen – to do something extraordinary to break the defensive lines. In Moutinho and Neves they don’t have a player who is comfortable taking control in the attacking third and making something happen. I recognize that players like that don’t grow on trees but for a side that has done so well recruiting and building a high-quality squad this seems like a pretty significant gap. What I don’t know is whether this gap exists due to lack of opportunity – they just couldn’t find the right player at a price they could afford who was willing to move to Wolverhampton – or lack of interest. I’m not writing off the possibility that Nuno Espirito Santo prefers the conservative approach they’ve been using and just hasn’t gone after a more traditional number ten.
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 – Lets be clear, that wouldn’t have been an easy save to make. It wasn’t that the ball was far away from De Gea but Patrick Van Aanholt’s shot was a screamer from close range and came right at mid-shin level. There isn’t exactly an easy way to contort one’s body to get where you need to be to stop that in the amount of time available. Still, from a fantasy point of view, enough things seem to be going wrong to be concerned about exactly how valuable DDG will be over the course of the season.
Stock Up: Tammy Abraham – Week 1, stock up as he started the opener. Week 2, stock down as he gave way to Giroud. Week 3, stock back up as he started again and scored an impressive brace. I don’t want to overreact and suggest he has the job locked down now, I suspect there will be rotation all season. That said, I think Abraham’s goals will at least buy him a larger share of that rotation for the immediate future.
Stock Down: Dani Ceballos – One of Week 2’s heroes looked lost in the Red tide. He’s still a must-own in the salary cap game due to his low salary and the fact that he won’t be playing Liverpool every week but perhaps caution is warranted as to when to start him.
Stock Up: PUUUUUUUKKKKKKIIIII – Another goal and an assist to boot. He truly is the breakout star of the fantasy season so far. Has there ever been a player that was 100% owned in the salary cap game? There’s certainly a case for him to test that notion.
Stock Up: Todd Cantwell – The young Canary made me look good for including him in this column last week with a goal to follow-up last weekend’s two assists. This feels a bit like early days Ryan Fraser or David Brooks emerging at a mid-table side.
Stock Down: Kepa + Chelsea defense – After three weeks things don’t look too good for the Blues defense. Maybe we reevaluate once Antonio Rüdiger gets back into the starting line-up but for now, we seem to be at the time where we have to start trying to change our perception of the brand that Chelsea has built in our collective minds over the past 15 years vs the reality of what they are this season.
Stock Up: Sébastien Haller – After two quiet weeks the shiny new toy in West Ham’s striker group broke out with a big match. Two goals at Vicarage Road belatedly announced his arrival in the Premier League. If he can lead the line effectively the West Ham attack could be fearsome with the array of attacking midfielders that they already had assembled.
Stock Up: Patrick Van Aanholt – Crystal Palace aren’t going to be very good. That said, PVA has demonstrated over the past three seasons that he’s a productive fantasy player on a per-minute basis. He is now the undisputed starter which means he should get more minutes and he’s already paying dividends with a clean sheet and a goal in three weeks. He was criminally under-drafted.
Stock Down: Mesut Ozil – It’s starting to feel a bit like Arsenal have been finding different reasons to keep Ozil out of the squad. Between the carjacking and the “illness” that seems to have put him back to ground zero with fitness/sharpness that was reported as excellent late in pre-season it feels like we’re being fed a convenient story. Ozil was drafted late on the possibility that he might feature and might return to some semblance of the player he was a few seasons ago. The more he’s not even involved, the less likely that becomes.
Stock Up: Mason Mount – He’s all over the place and, at the moment at least, taking his chances. He appears to be the type of player who will be in the middle of things all the time which means he’ll continue to get opportunities to score. Outside of the established stars, finding players who will be in position to make a difference in fantasy is difficult and Mount seems like he’s going to be one of the finds of the season.
Stock Down: Pascal Gross – Week 1 saw him start and score after worries that he might lose his spot to Leandro Trossard. Week 2 saw them start together. Week 3 saw the bad news that so many were concerned about come to pass as Gross only got 12 minutes as a substitute. As a guaranteed starter, he’s an interesting player. As a reserve or even if he’s still a part-time starter he’s much harder to justify having in your squad given limited spaces available.
Stock Up: Wesley and Joelinton – Two new forwards that will probably end up on the bottom half of the table but both showed out in Week 3. Both used their imposing physicality to hold up play and create opportunities for teammates while looking for their own chances. Both are probably more interesting in formats that directly reward peripheral stats like aerial duels won because I don’t expect either will be incredibly prolific over the course of the season but both gave at least some reason for hope that they were worthy selections for the third forward spot in your squad.
Stock Down: Riyad Mahrez – Even after Leroy Sané was lost for the season due to injury, Mahrez seems like he is no more than a quality reserve/spot starter in the eyes of Pep Guardiola. Consider him a latter-day version of Alexis Sánchez when he was at Barcelona. He will be a dynamite acquisition for someone whenever he decides it’s time to be a regular starter again but, until then, his best fantasy role seems to be as a handcuff for people who have Sterling or Bernardo Silva.
Stock Up: Joel Matip – No, not because of the goal – I don’t expect that’s going to become a regular part of his game – but because he’s gotten two starts to Joe Gomez’s one to start the season. If either player ends up with a decisive advantage in playing time that player will be a very valuable fantasy commodity. So far the early edge goes to Matip.
My Fantasy Fortunes
After an agonizingly long process, we finally finished our Togga-style slow draft (meaning we did it over Google Sheets and Twitter). The team I drafted looks like a who’s who of goalscorers from Week 3 which is a nice way to start off a new league. I drafted Sergio Agüero (2 goals), Jamie Vardy (1 goal), Diogo Jota (meh), Mason Mount (1 goal), Joao Moutinho (meh), John McGinn (1 assist + CS), Tyrone Mings (CS), and Todd Cantwell (1 goal) as my first 8 picks. We’ll suffice it to say that I won. Still waiting for final bonus points to be awarded in my PL.com leagues but it isn’t looking quite so good there. I might have my second 0-3 weekend in three league weeks. I wasn’t blown out in any of them but have to live with the frustration of Nathan Redmond’s points on one bench and Patrick Van Aanholt’s on another.
The Waiver Wire
For those that do need to make some changes, here are my thoughts on waiver wire claims for draft leagues:
Goalkeepers – You never want to chase points that have been scored in previous weeks but, in this case, picking up Martin Dubravka is based more on the visit of reeling Watford in Week 4 rather than the clean sheet against Spurs in Week 3.
Defenders – Using the same logic as Dubravka above, Matt Ritchie makes a lot of sense if you’re looking for a short-term streaming option in defense. Reclassified as a defender, he’s still involved in the attack and the visit of Watford means that a second clean sheet on the trot isn’t out of the question.
Midfielders – It feels like West Ham vs Norwich could be full of goals and I’m 100% on the Todd Cantwell train so he’d be my top choice if he wasn’t snapped up last week. If he was then it makes sense to track the situation with Pedro’s health as Ross Barkley could get another start against Sheffield United at Stamford Bridge.
Forwards – It is going to be a struggle to identify options at forward all season but Danny Ings is back on the radar. It looks like his minutes will be managed all season after two 60+ minute starts and a substitute appearance thus far but he’s managed a goal and an assist in that limited playing time so he’s worth a look as a third forward.
I’m resisting the temptation to move Arsenal ahead of Spurs but since they play each other next weekend we can make that our barometer rather than trying to compare their resumes from Week 1-3:
Manchester City
Liverpool
Spurs
Arsenal
Manchester United
Wolves
Boosts for some teams at the bottom of my relegation rankings as Newcastle and Crystal Palace both bot big wins. Watford, despite superior talent, just don’t look like they have it so they move down to the bottom of the list with Newcastle and Palace moving up a spot each (I don’t believe in the sustainability of their performances this weekend despite both having played very well against quality opposition).
Crystal Palace
Newcastle
Watford
We get a full week off before the Premier League resumes on Saturday with the North London Derby headlining the action as Sunday’s late match. Enjoy the week and hit me up on Twitter if you have questions about waivers or trades.
