Manchester United captain Bruno Fernandes, left, and Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola had very different Sundays Getty Images
Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football.
This was the round when Arsenal extended their lead at the top of the Premier League, Aston Villa lost ground after home defeat against 10-man Brentford, Chelsea came back from the dead to beat West Ham United and Liverpool completed a relatively fuss-free win over Newcastle United.
We will ask what explains the hold that Tottenham Hotspur seem to have over Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, whether Dominic Solanke’s goal for Spurs against City was the best scorpion kick we’ve seen in the Premier League, and what Bruno Fernandes’ brilliant form means for Manchester United and interim head coach Michael Carrick.
What explains Pep Guardiola’s record against Tottenham?
In Pep Confidential, his book about Guardiola’s 2013-14 debut season at Bayern Munich, Marti Perarnau wrote that, before every game, the head coach would retreat into a small office with his laptop to study the opposition, then emerge hours later, having come up with a way to beat them.
You wonder if, when he goes to plan his games against Tottenham, the Catalan has a file on that laptop that is just a giant question mark.
Guardiola has faced them 25 times in all competitions since joining City in summer 2016. Against only Liverpool does he have a worse record. He has won just five of his 13 away games against Spurs — again, he’s only done worse against Liverpool. He’s got a better career record against Real Madrid than Tottenham.
Whether it was that wild Champions League quarter-final in 2019 or losing 4-0 against Ange Postecoglou’s Spurs in 2024, or now only taking a point from the two games against a side everyone else has been beating up on this season, it’s an odd one to explain.
Sure, Tottenham have been very good in some of those seasons, but they finished 17th last season and are 14th today. City have still only beaten them once in four meetings across two league campaigns, the aggregate score being 8-3 to Spurs.
Pep Guardiola’s side also lost at home against Tottenham in AugustDarren Staples/AFP via Getty Images
Is this a strange curse that can’t be explained by conventional science? Is it a mental block that Guardiola develops whenever that cockerel badge appears in his vision? Is it a statistical freak?
Or is it another symbol of why City won’t win the Premier League this season, showing no inclination to close a gap on Arsenal that stands at six points?
On this occasion, Guardiola did have a genuine grievance, as surely Dominic Solanke’s first goal should not have stood after the striker kicked through the back of Marc Guehi’s leg to shovel the ball into the City net. “Another one,” Guardiola told Sky Sports afterwards, with that thin, mirthless smile on his face that appears whenever he believes he and his team have been wronged, which is apparently pretty often.
In the opening 45 minutes, Tottenham had been utterly dreadful and looked completely dead at half-time. City’s two goals were well-taken but Rayan Cherki and Antoine Semenyo were politely ushered towards the target, the Spurs defence playing the accommodating maitre d’. It was unforgivable that City even allowed them back into the game, let alone gave them a point from it.
The reasons for that, in a broader sense, are complicated and varied, but explaining Guardiola’s apparent inability to figure out Tottenham? The curse seems the most likely one at this stage.
Where does Dominic Solanke’s effort rank in the annals of scorpion kicks?
You can’t quite call Solanke’s second goal against City on Sunday unique — we’ve seen scorpion kicks in the Premier League.
The two that immediately spring to mind came within about a week of each other in 2016-17: Olivier Giroud scored one for Arsenal against Crystal Palace, turning what was actually a pretty bad cross from Alexis Sanchez into a goal with a flick that he only just managed to hook off the bar and into the net.
Then Henrikh Mkhitaryan bagged one for Manchester United against Sunderland, this one more of a flick-on from a Zlatan Ibrahimovic ball into the box.
There have been others: arguably neither of the above was better than Valentino Lazaro for Borussia Monchengladbach against Bayer Leverkusen in 2020, or even Riley McGree’s in Australia back in 2018, and Ibrahimovic got one of his own for Paris Saint-Germain in 2013. Because of course he did.
But was Solanke’s the best we’ve seen in the Premier League? By their nature, scorpion-kick goals aren’t the sort of thing you plan for: they’re moments of inspired improvisation, with an element of luck involved, too. Something should be said for the fact that Solanke was sprinting more or less at full pelt when the cross from Conor Gallagher came in, and he needed to adjust his stride pattern to flick the ball over goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma.
It does lose some aesthetic points from Donnarumma getting a hand to it, helping it on its way into the net, but from a technical point of view, it’s at least the equal of any of the examples above.
On a more basic level, it was a goal for Solanke: an ankle injury kept him out from August to January, meaning that his two on Sunday were his first in the Premier League all season, following a couple in the Champions League. If Tottenham are to salvage something from this fairly bleak domestic campaign, their England striker’s form will be crucial.
It came as part of a decent weekend for Premier League centre-forwards, with Hugo Ekitike doing his best Fernando Torres impression in bagging a double for Liverpool against Newcastle, while Viktor Gyokeres finding the net for Arsenal at Leeds was only his sixth Premier League goal of the season, but his fourth in six games in all competitions. Throw in Benjamin Sesko winning it for Manchester United against Fulham yesterday, and those of us who still enjoy a good proper No 9 end this round of fixtures feeling very satisfied.
Will Bruno Fernandes beat the Premier League assists record?
Three games, three wins. Is that a clamour we see before us?
Any talk of who the Manchester United head coach will be next season is overshadowed by the last time they had a former club hero in caretaker charge and got the permanent job after a brilliant run, so you can understand why people are reticent about talking up Michael Carrick’s prospects of getting the gig more long-term.
But whoever the next person in charge of the United first team is, Carrick is certainly making the last one look pretty silly. It wasn’t just that Ruben Amorim’s 3-4-2-1 system didn’t really work, it was that it raised more questions than it answered. And one of those questions went: is this really the best use of Bruno Fernandes?
Now, Fernandes did well in that deeper role under Amorim, because he is the club’s best player and one of the top midfielders in the Premier League. But with a freer, more attacking remit, United get so much more from their captain.
Bruno Fernandes has 12 Premier League assists this seasonMatt McNulty/Getty Images
He notched up another two assists in Sunday’s win against Fulham: one was the free kick from which Casemiro headed in their first goal, the other was finding Sesko in the area for their late winner. That’s 12 for the season, four of which have come in the three games since Carrick took over, and five ahead of the next best in the Premier League, Rayan Cherki of neighbours City. You can throw in another from the FA Cup tie against Brighton, under interim interim Darren Fletcher, who again deployed the Portugal international as a No 10.
The record for most assists in a Premier League season is 20, originally set by Arsenal’s Thierry Henry in 2003-04 and matched by Kevin De Bruyne of City in 2019-20: with 14 games to go, it’s really not hard to imagine Fernandes surpassing that mark.
Fernandes’ brilliant form is representative of United’s revival generally, but also a symbol of how they just make much more sense now.
Whether these good results under Carrick will continue, who knows, but if Fernandes continues in this role, his personal form will almost certainly carry on.
Coming up this week
- It’s always difficult to predict how much will actually happen on a transfer deadline day, but whether there are two deals or a thousand (both unlikely — probably somewhere in-between), stick with The Athletic, David Ornstein and the rest of our reporters for the latest. We’ll have a live blog going, there will be a live stream and all the latest moves, manoeuvrings and desperate attempts to get deals done before the 7pm UK (2pm ET) deadline will be here.
- File under: not ideal timing for Sunderland and Burnley, deadline-day-wise. Those two have got to play each other on Monday night, which could hamper things for managers Regis Le Bris and Scott Parker.
- Take a nice big glug of Carabao and settle in for some piping-hot semi-final action: the League Cup’s second legs are this week, starting with Arsenal vs Chelsea on Tuesday, when Mikel Arteta’s side take a 3-2 lead into the Emirates Stadium fixture.
- Then on Wednesday, it’s City vs Newcastle, with Guardiola and company having won the first leg 2-0.
- You get a little bonus Premier League game this week too, but will have to wait until Friday for it: Leeds United vs Nottingham Forest, in the “Strong but wildly contrasting opinions about Brian Clough” derby.
Source: nytimes
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