Every week we preview three fascinating things to look out for in the big Premier League games – culminating with Tottenham v Chelsea on Thursday.
The very last chance of survival
It was a miserable weekend for the Premier League’s bottom three. A 2-2 draw between Fulham and West Brom felt like a missed opportunity in itself, but the result was made even worse by the fact Newcastle United, Crystal Palace and Brighton all picked up three points. The only teams down there who didn’t – Wolves and Burnley – both look far too talented and organised to suddenly fall apart in the second half of the season.
There is now seven points between 18th and 17th. The distance is nine points for West Brom and 13 for Sheffield United, all-but sealing their relegation to the Championship next season. If the tiniest sliver of hope remains for either side then they simply have to win the six-pointer on Tuesday. This is it. No more chances.
Unfortunately, fear and defensive conservatism are the defining characteristics of both clubs right now, which points to a mutually unhelpful point apiece.
Six-pointer for the league’s two European outsiders
Manchester City are on fire, Liverpool are stabilising, Chelsea have upgraded manager and Arsenal are rapidly improving. After all the fun of the first third of the Premier League season it sadly looks as though the traditional powerhouses will rise to the top by May, which means rather than hunting down a fairy-tale Champions League spot the likes of Everton, West Ham, Aston Villa and Southampton are now battling it out for a single Europa League place.
Villa and West Ham, separated by three points, will not both be in Europe next season, and with the top half of the table looking more like a typical Premier League relegation battle (four points separates fifth from tenth) these six-pointers have added significance.
Jack Grealish’s frankly ridiculous form naturally gives Villa the upper hand on Wednesday. Another brilliant display at St. Mary’s at the weekend prompted Gary Lineker on Match of the Day to suggest Grealish is on for PFA Player of the Year, and you’d be hard pushed to find a better candidate right now.
However, Grealish continues to paper over some cracks at Villa Park. Dean Smith has done a brilliant job at Villa and there is no doubt they are one of the most entertaining teams in the division even without their captain, and yet in games against top-half clubs Villa consistently appear porous. They have wobbly moments and they sometimes expand too high and wide in possession when a more conservative approach would be wiser.
The way Southampton carved them open again and again on Saturday, only for last-ditch heroics to deny the hosts, was in keeping with Villa’s performances against the Premier League’s middle class. And so a brutal and ruthlessly efficient West Ham should be able to overpower the Villa midfield; should be able to set Michail Antonio away with surprising consistency.
That doesn’t mean Grealish won’t dazzle again and ultimately hand Villa the three points. But it is Villa’s decompressed, semi-permeable formation as much as Grealish’s brilliance that makes Villa the division’s most entertaining team to watch.
Tide is turning against Jose Mourinho
We should always be wary of using social media to draw conclusions about the mood of a fan base, but there’s a point when the cries of discontent are so harmonised that it becomes difficult to ignore. That is especially true when the reaction – frustration, boredom, existential ennui – is so alarmingly familiar to anyone perusing Twitter towards the end of Jose Mourinho’s tenure at Manchester United or his second spell at Chelsea.
A week is a long time in football, and in the maddeningly narrative-defying year of 2020/21 the maxim has taken on a whole new meaning. It wasn’t that long ago Spurs were top of the league and just waiting for Gareth Bale to explode into the first team. One week from now Tottenham could be sitting snugly within the top four with a League Cup final and FA Cup quarter-final around the corner.
And yet with Mourinho when the tide turns it never seems to recover. His entire identity is built on psychological power; on the collective belief in an idea, and as such as soon as a club sees through the façade there is no turning back. His ultra-conservative football relies upon individual creativity and dogged determination, so once the players begin to fear they will concede goals, fear the wrath of their manager if they play badly, and hear the weariness from the fan base, a negative spiral is triggered.
In other words, once the anger is no longer projected outwards but internalised, playing defensive football stops looking steely and starts to look weak and fearful, inviting passivity and sows the seeds of its own downfall.
This is a bad time to be facing Chelsea. Thomas Tuchel appears to have instantly improved Chelsea’s defensive shape, using a compact 3-4-2-1 that keeps five players behind the ball at all times. Wolves and Burnley were hardly stern tests of Chelsea’s defensive resolve and yet the improvement in the transition was stark. This is what detailed positional structure looks like, and it ought to be enough to track Heung-Min Son – Tottenham’s only creative player while Harry Kane is out injured.
There was a time, back in November, when it looked as though the Mourinho approach – conservative, counter-attacking – was ideally suited to an exhausting season in which there was barely any time on the training field. But with the Premier League table more compressed than ever before, now it looks like the increased vulnerability to plunging into a (misleading) mid-table position makes Mourinho – all about psychology, momentum, self-esteem – the worst kind of manager for the moment.
The chances are a more structurally coherent and confident Chelsea will make Spurs look passive and neutered in attack, further damaging Mourinho’s stock in north London. There is no immediate danger of a full-scale crisis at Tottenham, but the simple truth is that with Mourinho at the helm catastrophe never feels far away.
Alex Keble
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