Premier League winners and losers: Arsenal, West Ham, Ekitike, Glasner, Carrick, Newcastle | OneFootball

Arsenal and Hugo Ekitike are embracing the pressure of their new roles in the Premier League, while Oliver Glasner and Eddie Howe’s cry-arsing rings hollow.

The Premier League title race is over yet again, and the shot in the arm of the relegation battle sadly did not last.

Have a Premier League table tab open while we run down the most recent winners and losers.

Premier League winners

Arsenal

Have they broken the record for the most Premier League titles declared both won and lost in the same season yet?

Mikel Arteta is level-headed enough to let that infernal battle play out away from the Emirates. While the pundits deliver their latest hot takes and rivals line up to set up Arsenal for the ultimate fall, his reframing of this run-in as “fun” and something to “enjoy” after the nervousness which encapsulated the loss to Manchester United was wise.

They will drop points again and there will be panic. But Arsenal responding to all three of their Premier League defeats so far with victory in their very next game is telling.

Their closest rivals drew with a bottom-half side decimated by injury and lost at home to 10 men. The reaction to Manchester City and Aston Villa’s slips generated a fraction of the fume and mockery that met Arsenal’s recent wobble (of one defeat in nine games). Block out the noise and they will be fine.

Hugo Ekitike

The last player not named Mo Salah to end a season as Liverpool’s top goalscorer was Philippe Coutinho in 2016/17. In the two campaigns before that it was Daniel Sturridge and Steven Gerrard. They scored 14, 13 and 13 goals respectively.

With his 14th and 15th strikes of an exceptional debut season, Ekitike burst past all three and fully embraced his responsibility as the club’s clearest and most potent attacking threat.

It was a masterclass of movement and finishing from the highest-scoring new signing of the Premier League season so far. And a workshop in ingratiating oneself with the supporters too, considering his taunting of the club who sensed he might be capable of embracing Alexander Isak’s mantle.

Fate transpired to pit Ekitike directly against Isak in the summer. On the evidence of the last few months, the most expensive player in British football history might need to start taking notes from the sidelines on a 23-year-old phenomenon.

Michael Carrick

Fair play for taking it upon himself to test that absurd Roy Keane stance, also previously echoed by Gary Neville, that Manchester United should not appoint Carrick even if he wins every game from now until the end of the season.

Carrick has already equalled Ruben Amorim’s longest run of consecutive Premier League wins. If he navigates the narrative minefield of Spurs and West Ham in his next two matches then get over yourself and give him that blank contract.

Brentford

Brentford are also in the FA Cup fourth round against sixth-tier opposition, having made it to the FA Cup quarter-finals. It is a potentially historic season, difficult to fathom considering what they lost in the summer.

Keith Andrews – and those who had the foresight to promote him – deserves immense credit for that. Doing the double over Unai Emery and Aston Villa is a remarkable feat.

Angus Gunn

A first Premier League clean sheet since Dean Smith’s Norwich thrashed Claudio Ranieri’s Watford in January 2022.

It eternally damns Crystal Palace that Gunn did not face a single shot on target on his Nottingham Forest debut as a half-time substitute for a team reduced to 10 men. He did have a couple of high balls to deal with but did so with relative ease.

Those 45 minutes could be Gunn’s last at club level in a World Cup year after the signing of Stefan Ortega and introduction of Neco Williams to the City Ground goalkeeper pecking order. It might be enough to keep Craig Gordon out against Haiti, Morocco and Brazil.

But that second-half performance fundamentally underlined how Dyche has these players on board and attuned to his demands. While his methods will never retain the full support of the fans as the effectiveness wears off over time and their entertainment value is automatically set at zero, they have been what Forest needed in the moment.

Only five clubs have conceded fewer goals since he inherited the Premier League’s third-worst defence in October. If they stay up, there will be no mystery about how.

Chelsea

Take it from those far more handsome and presumably well-endowed:

There should be no zone red enough for Benoit Badiashile to be dusted off, or to necessitate Alejandro Garnacho starting.

Bournemouth

An eight-game unbeaten run, bleeding straight into an 11-game winless streak, and now a sequence of three wins and a draw.

That is an Andoni Iraola special. And good lord, Eli Junior Kroupi is special.

David Moyes

Four more draws to simultaneously rack up 200 Premier League stalemates and overtake Arsene Wenger for the most ever overseen by a manager.

If he doesn’t then immediately pull out a “that’s what I do, draw” in an echo of that wonderful first West Ham press conference boast, Moyes can definitively be declared a coward.

It is also really good fun to see Everton rationing their goals so beautifully. The eight teams above them have scored at least eight more goals than the Toffees, who have still not had one player score more than a single goal in any game in all competitions all season.

Beto and Thierno Barry are doing really well learning how to be patient and take turns.

Wolves

Play like that in the Championship and a strikeforce of Adam Armstrong and Che Adams will score 100 goals each, even before they spend £10m on Barry Bannan.

Premier League losers

West Ham

It feels like Paco Jemez had his point ultimately proved a week later.

“It’s a football situation where he tells me to do one thing and I tell him the substitution wasn’t bad, but I’d do it with someone else,” the West Ham assistant said of his touchline tiff with Nuno Espirito Santo, who sought to close out a win over Sunderland by reaching for his Max Kilman-shaped comfort blanket.

It was the second consecutive win in which Kilman had been brought on in stoppage time to shore things up. While the Hammers held on in both games, half an hour with a slender lead away at a resurgent Chelsea felt like a sub-optimal time to introduce the goal concession magnet.

There was no specific individual blame to hand out for either of Chelsea’s goals thereafter, but trying to soak up pressure for that long, against that team, in that stadium and those circumstances, was certainly a choice.

It would have been risky for a manager who had orchestrated at least one solitary clean sheet since April 1. That Nuno has failed to do so in his last 32 games in charge of West Ham and Nottingham Forest could well prove terminal to their survival hopes.

No club has dropped more points from winning positions this season than West Ham. Add just one third of the 18 they have squandered and the Hammers would be level with Forest and Leeds. Either the coach or the players need to learn how to manage a game properly.

Crystal Palace

There it is.

Oliver Glasner “would prefer not to be talking the day before the deadline about transfers”. His wish was “that everything had been sorted two weeks ago, so we could train and focus on development”. His belief is that Crystal Palace “are starting again from two years ago, having to teach them how we want to play and how we want to attack”.

The Nottingham Forest draw was a difficult lesson in that regard: 45 chastening minutes being out-played by the side in 17th with 10 men cannot be entirely blamed on having to wait one entire day of January before spending £35m on Brennan Johnson.

It just isn’t going to work. The resentment he still carries against a hierarchy identifying potential signings to both appease a coach who is leaving in a matter of months and to suit his successor is clear, and having an obvious impact on the pitch.

Glasner feels they are “taking a step backwards” by recruiting players in mid-season and having to indoctrinate them in his ways while in the weeds of a 12-game winless run.

But his rudimentary inability to coach against low blocks feels like a bigger problem: since the start of last season, Palace have had more than 50 per cent possession in 14 Premier League games, and won only three of them (with 55 per cent v Ipswich, with 53 per cent v Spurs and with 52 per cent v Wolves).

With 67 per cent on the ball against Nottingham Forest, their issues – albeit without progressive ball players the calibre of Adam Wharton and Daichi Kamada – were laid painfully bare.

Newcastle

Eddie Howe can pretend all he likes that “PSR is controlling what we’re able to do, and you’ll understand that gives us limited room to manoeuvre – to try to bring a player in who is good enough to elevate the group and to have a long-term future at the football club, with the finances we have available, is very difficult”.

But it rings hollow when your bench at Anfield is occupied by two centre-forwards signed in the summer for a combined £120m, watching three wide forwards buzz around in an eternal 4-3-3.

Howe has to find another way of coping, especially against this calibre of opposition. Newcastle have won a single game out of eight against the current top six; the only clubs with fewer points from matches against Arsenal, Manchester City, Aston Villa, Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool this season than the Magpies (five) are the bottom three.

This was meant to be the season Newcastle properly challenged the foundations of the elite, armed with a trophy, Champions League qualification and a record level of investment. Between last summer and this season, the sheer depths of that gap have only been emphasised.

Aston Villa

It feels like this is precisely what Unai Emery meant when he told everyone to shut up about the title and said Aston Villa “are still not being contenders” for the top five as “there are other teams with more potential than us”.

One home defeat to 10-man Brentford with Tammy Abraham leading the line and two substitutions being made while chasing the game later, and Jamie Redknapp need no longer performatively pretend not to understand the point.

If they’re not already ignoring the temptation to look up at Arsenal and instead stare down at a resurgent Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool, now is probably the time.

Antonee Robinson

No defender has been dribbled past more often per 90 minutes in the Premier League this season. Knee surgery, missing pre-season and facing Amad will do that to you.

Leeds