Category: Football (Soccer)

Mikel Merino excelled as a striker for Arsenal on Saturday. Chris Whyte did not have as much joy 40 years ago

By Steven Pye for That 1980s Sports Blog

You didn’t need to be a genius to work out what was coming. Going two transfer windows without signing a centre-forward was always going to be a gamble for Arsenal, especially considering that their one remaining option was clearly out on his feet in recent weeks. The injury to Kai Havertz was depressingly inevitable.

Mikel Arteta had a dilemma before the Leicester match at the weekend. With no strikers available, he opted to play Leandro Trossard through the middle. When that didn’t work, Mikel Merino came on and scored both goals in the 2-0 win. Merino’s timely goals have temporarily halted the debate but, if all else fails, Arteta could throw Riccardo Calafiori up front and get the ball into the mixer.

The optimism that greeted Jim Ratcliffe’s arrival as owner has given way to even more disappointment, with Sunday’s defeat at Tottenham the latest example

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Covering Manchester United these days feels a little like being a character in Silent Witness: every week you end up writing a postmortem. Their Sunday defeat at Tottenham was an engaging if bitty affair that finished 1-0 largely because the low quality of defending on show was compensated for by the low level of attacking. It was fun in its way, but it didn’t feel a lot like Premier League football.

It also meant United dropped to 15th in the table, having won just four of 14 league games under Ruben Amorim. Under Erik ten Hag this season, United were taking 1.22 points per game; under Amorim that’s down to 1.00. Nobody was under any illusions about the scale of the task he was taking on, but four months after Amorim took the job it would be very difficult to identify any concrete signs of progress. There has been the resilience of the performance in the league at Anfield, in the FA Cup at the Emirates, and not a lot else.

Manchester United’s slump deepens, Ryan Christie inspires Bournemouth and David Moyes lets the good times roll

• Premier League top scorers | Latest table | Fixtures

Can winning a game that resembled two lurching drunks swinging at each other at closing time be regarded as vindication for Ange Postecoglou? Perhaps if Manchester United had a more mobile midfield and someone other than Rasmus Højlund at centre-forward – last goal at Plzen on 12 December – flanked by a winger in Alejandro Garnacho who last scored against Bodø/Glimt two weeks before that. It turns out Joshua Zirkzee – who has three goals in the league all season – is United’s most potent forward. The numbers point to this being United’s worst team in decades, and the only good news Ruben Amorim received on Sunday was 17th-placed Wolves’ defeat at Liverpool. Tottenham saw out a second successive Premier League clean sheet for the first time in 16 months but did so nervously. It will take much more than sketchily defeating a crashing clown car to prove Postecoglou’s pronouncement that the true Tottenham would reveal themselves once his injured players started returning. John Brewin

Match report: Tottenham 1-0 Manchester United

Match report: Leicester 0-2 Arsenal

Match report: Manchester City 4-0 Newcastle

Match report: Liverpool 2-1 Wolves

Match report: Aston Villa 1-1 Ipswich

Match report: Fulham 2-1 Nottingham Forest

Match report: Southampton 1-3 Bournemouth

Match report: Crystal Palace 1-2 Everton