Premier League Round Up (Sep 24-26 2016)

Leicester kicked things off this weekend by ruining everyone’s fun. The whole country has been enjoying poking fun at loser Mourinho and his three game losing streak, and Leicester really ought to have piled on the misery by making it four. After all, they’re the Champions and they’re a better team.
 
Unfortunately they’ve gone "big time" now and seem to think games like this are beneath them. They’ve got a100% record in the Champions League but they can’t be arsed with the bread and butter stuff at the moment.
 
I didn’t watch any of it (for those who haven’t been paying attention, I’m only going to watch the highlights of Manc games when they’ve lost), but apparently Leicester were well on top until they fell behind and then subsequently folded like a cheap suit. They must have been bad as even Pogba managed to finally do something worthwhile. All this happened without Rooney of course, who was left on the bench as Jose went into self preservation mode. “See, it’s Rooney’s fault we were losing, not mine”.
 
I saw Twitter exploding with all this talk about resurgent United running riot and Pogba finally showing his worth. I'm enjoying them being crap and I don't want that to change so this development was a little disconcerting. Then I find out that all is not necessarily what it seems. Three of their four goals came from corners, including Pogba’s. So they’ve basically West Brom’d the shit out of Leicester, yet the narrative was how fantastic they were and how Pogba is now up and running. He scored a header from a corner and suddenly he’s showing why they paid £90m for him??? Let’s see him doing some awesome Adam Lallana style shit before we start anointing the cunt as the new Zidane, eh?
 
I read a comment from Danny Simpson saying they can’t defend corners now because of the clampdown on shirt pulling. We defo moved Skrtel on at the right time then. 
 
The other Manc twats won too, although they didn’t have it all their own way against Swansea. Aguero’s clever turn and finish put them ahead but the home side hit back through Llorente. Aguero’s second came from the spot after a dubious penalty decision, and Sterling wrapped it up with a great goal on the counter late on.
 
I’m sick of hearing about “resurgent Sterling” though and how well he’s playing. He’s doing alright, but even when he’s doing good things he often manages to look like he should be playing in my daughter’s under 10 team. It’s the feeble way he strikes the ball, he’d fit right in at that level. I was arguing with my dad about him the other day, he was raving about how well Sterling is playing. “He wouldn’t get in our team” I said. “Oh he would” was the somewhat surprising response. “Behave, instead of who???” I mocked. I’m still waiting for an answer to that. No doubt he’s biding his time until his favourite whipping boy Firmino has a bad game and then he’ll throw that at me.
 
I genuinely don’t miss Sterling one bit though. I still cry myself to sleep at night pining for Suarez, but Sterling doesn’t even merit a second thought. He probably would thrive in Klopp’s set up, but I prefer who we have now and City are welcome to his powder puff shooting and stupid camp dinosaur running style. 
 
A lot of people have crowned City already after the start they made, but it’s still early days. In De Bruyne and Aguero they’ve got the two best players in the league for me, but the rest of them don’t scare me. I also stand by what I said after week one that this smart arse style of theirs will end up costing them when opposing coaches figure it out. I actually reckon we’ll fucking murder them, but if they continue to walk all over the shite teams in the league it won’t really matter what we do as they’ll comfortably win the title. Others need to step up and have a go at them the way Brendan’s Celtic did, and if they do then it could be wide open this year. 
 
To the opposite end of the table now, and can things get any worse for Sunderland? They can’t even win games when they have a two goal lead. They’re a complete shambles, and haven't won in August or September four years running. You can't keep starting like that and surviving, it's going to catch up with them eventually and this is probably going to be the year. 
 
Defoe’s double looked to have sent them on their way to three points against Palace but Joe Ledley’s deflected shot brought Palace back into it and Sunderland completely shit the bed. McArthur headed Palace level and then deep, deep, deep into stoppage time Benteke headed the winner. 
 
How can you just allow Benteke a free run like that? It’s schoolboy stuff. Not only was he not marked, but no-one even tried to impede his run. Sunderland lined up as they would to defend a free-kick from out wide, when this was only about a foot from the corner flag. It was to all intents and purposes a corner kick. Can players not think for themselves anymore? Moyes was right to bemoan that, but he then said “you can’t always blame the manager, the players have to take responsibility”. That's true, but it's not for the manager himself to say that, you leave that to the pundits otherwise you end up sounding like Mourinho and your players will think you're a massive prick.   
 
Just imagine where Sunderland would be without Defoe. He's the only thing they have going for them right now. Without him they’d never fucking score, let alone win any points. The interesting thing for me is will they stick with Moyes if this continues? After all, Fat Sam is back on the market now. My Mackem brother in law text me the other day when that story initially broke, saying “Sack the greedy fat bastard”. He followed it up with “I’ve read his book, he talks about money a lot so I’m not surprised. Greedy corrupt bastard" and then finally, "I’d have him back tomorrow”
 
That’s the thing isn't it, as much of an odious, money grabbing sack of shit as he is, if you’re Sunderland you’d surely be thinking about trying to get him back as you need to stay in the division and he gives you the best chance of doing it. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he is back there at Christmas or just after.
 
Another manager who might be hearing Fat Sam’s elephant like footsteps behind him is “Useless” at Stoke, who still haven’t won this season. “Wee Joe” got his first goal for them with a nice close range finish against West Brom, but they gave away a needless corner in stoppage time and well… you know what comes next. West Brom, corner kick, goal. I did say last week that Stoke were having real problems defending corners, so the last thing they needed was to come up against their old boss "alehouse Tony".
 
Pulis was actually taking charge of his 1000th game, which on the face of it is quite impressive. What isn't so impressive is the fact that of those 1000 games, you can count the entertaining ones on the fingers of a sloth.
 
Moving on, and Spurs were without Harry Kane but still won at Middlesboro as Son took centre stage with a first half double. Gibson headed Boro back into it but they couldn’t find an equaliser and Spurs have now had their best start to a season for 51 years. Fear not though, they’re still Spurs and they’ll remember that eventually.
 
That noise you may have heard in the Merseyside and North Wales area on Saturday afternoon was the sound of thousands of balloons being burst as Everton lost at Bournemouth. The Blueshite had been getting more than a little ahead of themselves after a good start to the season but two defeats in four days have brought them crashing back down to reality. Stanislas got the only goal of the game and it was a cracker too. Bournemouth were the better side and deserved the win. 
 
This week’s “I didn’t know they’d signed him” is Enner Valencia at Everton. This time last year he was hot property after a good start at West Ham, now he’s ended up on Everton’s bench. Not sure how that happened, but this is clearly the beginning of the end for him. 
 
It’s funny listening to the local phone ins, as they really seem to fucking hate Barkley for some reason. He does seem to give the ball away quite a lot, but - Lukaku apart - he’s still their best player by a country mile. That’s ok though Blues, you keep hounding him out so you can boo the shit out of him when he ends up at City or Chelsea.
 
Speaking of Chelsea, Arsenal murdered them in the first half at the Emirates. Gary Cahill is making David Luiz look Mr Reliable these days. Without Mongo alongside him Cahill is a train wreck. He gifted the opening goal to Sanchez and looked all at sea throughout. Ruud Gullit on MOTD described it as “Driving Miss Daisy” defending, which is fucking ace. A lot of what he comes out with is bollocks, but I kinda like him, he’s funny, and that was a hell of a line. 
 
Walcott and Ozil added further goals and a humiliation looked like it might be on the cards for Chelsea. As so often happens though, the team with the big first half lead eased off after the break and the team that was getting it’s arse handed to it buckled down and shut up shop. 
 
I was amused to see that Conte went full on Italian and decided to play with an extra defender in the second half, even though his team trailed by three goals. No thoughts of any “Istanbul” style comeback from him, no sir, it was purely a damage limitation exercise. Classic Italian.
 
Pretty sure I’ve told this story before but fuck it, I’ll tell it again as it’s class and it’s relevant to what happened here...
 
So the TLW footy team had a game against Sony a few years back and we were getting fucking annihilated. It was 6-0 at half time and we were clearly in way over our heads. One of the lads gives a big rousing speech about how the score doesn’t matter, let’s just enjoy ourselves in the second half, pretend it’s 0-0 and try and get ourselves a goal. 
 
Very inspirational stuff, and we’re all encouraging each other to go out and have a right go at them, but then our Italian team-mate Serafino pipes up and says “I say we go six at the back and keep the 6-0”.
 
We ignored him and we did indeed go out there and get ourselves a goal, but we ended up losing something like 13-1 (it was probably more but we lost count). At the end of the game, Seraf gives me a knowing look and just says “six at the back”.  
 
Chelsea getting twatted just isn’t as much fun when Mourinho isn’t involved. I took no pleasure from this at all, mainly because it was Arsenal doing the twatting and because I quite like Conte. He's got his work cut out there though I think.
 
Sunday was great fun. I didn’t think it would be as I had it down as the day when West Ham finally stopped fucking about and got their season back on track. Instead, they plumbed new depths of misery as they were destroyed at home by Southampton. My boy Charlie Austin is back amongst the goals this season and has ensured the Saints haven’t missed greedy arse Pelle who fucked off to China.
 
Austin’s opening goal was a lovely finish with his left foot, and he made the second with a brilliant ball for Tadic. Ward-Browse made it 3-0 late on, but it really should have been treble that, it was incredible how many chances Southampton created. How long before Payet’s agent is putting it out there that he’s unsettled and wants a move? I’ll set the over / under on October.
 
This is great though, if this continues all season it will be one of the funniest, most satisfying things since… since… well since it happened to Mourinho at Chelsea this time last year. Fuck you West Ham, fuck you and your new stadium. Let’s see how you fill it when you’re in the Championship, you slags.
 
Nice to see that our feeder club have got their act together of late though. It’s important they do well as we don’t want to be signing players who are low on confidence. It’s quite funny how for all the piss taking we’ve done about the signings from Southampton, right now we’ve got four of them in our first choice line up and they’re all looking like money well spent. Who’d have thunk it? The question now is who’s next? Bertrand probably, he was great in this game. Tadic might be a decent outside bet too. 
 
Finally, I haven’t seen any figures but I think it’s safe to assume that Monday Night Football set records for the highest and lowest viewing figures in the show's history. The high came in the build up to the game when everyone tuned in to watch Klopp. The low was when the actual game kicked off, as seriously, who was staying tuned for Burnley against Watford? 
 
For the record, Burnley won but nobody cared.