Category: Football (Soccer)

• City played in Champions League on Thursday night

• Captain says schedule lacks ‘respect’ and ‘common sense’

Bernardo Silva has accused the fixture schedulers of lacking respect and common sense, saying they put Manchester City at such a physical disadvantage for Sunday’s 1-1 draw at Arsenal that it was “not fair” and “just not right”.

The City captain said he and his teammates could not be at their best level for one of the biggest games of the season after being asked to play in the Champions League on Thursday night; they beat Napoli 2-0 at home.

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Aston Villa’s struggles continue, more West Ham problems while Brighton wrap up Carlos Baleba in cotton wool

• Premier League top scorers 2025-26: who is leading race?

Pep Guardiola becomes ever more the traditional English football man. As his Manchester City stay extends to 10 seasons, he relies ever more on the principle that big players can win big matches. Hence his late-career conversion to employing a wrecking ball striker in the peerless Erling Haaland. As for his former assistant Mikel Arteta, Arsenal looked stuck in the weeds of over-thinking. Benching Eberechi Eze, who tortured City in last season’s FA Cup final, till half-time was just too clever by half. Arteta’s recent talk of using rugby strategy, of thinking of substitutes as finishers, in the style of South Africa’s “bomb squad” is all very well. Even if the substitute Gabriel Martinelli scored the equaliser from an Eze long ball, a talented, capable squad playing one-dimensional fare is far less explicable. This is not the City who previously dominated the Premier League. They showed their own limitations, particularly once Haaland, brilliant as attacker and defender, was removed. John Brewin

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Gabriel Martinelli’s injury-time goal cancelled out a beauty from Erling Haaland and denied City an old-fashioned away win

4 min Arsenal have started pretty well. Trossard makes a surging run down the left before being eased to the ground with a hint of disdain by Khusanov. No foul given.

1 min And they’re off. City have started with Phil Foden on the right and Bernardo Silva as the right-sided No8, a swap from the last two games. This is their revised line-up.

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Newcastle continued their 100% entirely goalless 2025-26 away game record with a high-pace, no-chance stalemate at Bournemouth

6 mins: It’s Newcastle’s fans making all the noise, and Bournemouth’s team making all the play.

4 mins: Nearly a chance! The ball is given to Scott, who has a fairly simple pass to release either of two runners about to burst untracked beyond the Newcastle defence but can’t find it.

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A precious win for Ruben Amorim on a rainy, rowdy and ramshackle night at Old Trafford

Let’s have a rummage around the pre-match postbag ... and by the looks of the contents, Ruben Amorim has lost the crowd.

“Any sign of a Papal Bull at Old Trafford? After all, there’s been plenty of another kind of bull there over the last 12 months” – Gary Naylor

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Manchester United kicked off in a deluge and 17th place, and ended soaked-through and jubilant at a benchmark victory that lifts them to ninth. The win is notable as it can be used as the calling-card performance for the Ruben Amorim project. In the first half 10-man Chelsea were pummelled mercilessly by his United unit that was quicker, stronger, more menacing, and just plain better than the club world champions.

After this, the conditions and Casemiro’s late opening period sending off matched Robert Sánchez’s own early shower, and the teams levelled the other out.

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Everton mounted a highly spirited comeback from two goals down but the champions grimly held on to prevail in the 247th Merseyside derby

• Read Will Unwin’s match report from Anfield

Arne Slot: During his pre-match presser, Liverpool’s head coach was asked about the possibility of playing his summer signings Alexander Isak or Hugo Ekitike up front in the same team, either today or at some point in the future. “I consider many things and it depends always on how well they are doing,” he said. “If both of them are in the best form of their life then you consider more to play them together, but it is quite clear that we have a certain structure of 4-3-3.”

On today’s derby: “It’s going to be a difficult game. I don’t know exactly what they are going to do as they played long balls last season but are playing more out from the back this year. Our focus should be on what we need to do to win the game and that is being intense and winning duels.”

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Charges tribunal is still to report on rule breaches, but does the league want to discredit its eight-time champions anyway?

Happy one-year anniversary! How has it been? How do you feel? More, or less, in love? Have you counted down the days? Are you happier, wiser, more centred, like a man in a porridge advert going for a soulful morning run in a sunlit cul-de-sac?

Perhaps, to offer another perspective, you feel so viscerally nauseated at the prospect of leafing through the pre-planned partisan responses to a highly complex piece of legal wrangling there’s a danger your own intestines will liquefy and snort out of your nostrils straight into the toaster. Who knows? Maybe that was the point all along.

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