Here comes the Premier League, rushing back to center stage, its hunger for drama never remotely sated. A league of the big six and the field? No one told Newcastle, Brentford, or even Hull.Many delivered stunning results on Saturday and Sunday, thrusting big names into some early-season turmoil. Ninety minutes of football is far, far too few to definitively say that any team is in crisis. And yet … did you see the Aston Villa result? We’ll pick up on that first of all, but there are plenty of other big names whose sense of panic we must assess first of all.Panic meter:🚨 = Low panic level 🚨🚨 = Medium panic level 🚨🚨🚨 = High panic levelAston VillaPanic meter: 🚨🚨🚨Horror results happen every once in a while and, Europa League holders or not, the gap between Aston Villa and Brighton is not so great that there cannot be a shellacking on a day where everything goes wrong for one team and right for the other. And boy did everything go wrong for Unai Emery’s side. It really was one of those days where it looks like you, Pau Torres, have got a massive reprieve for your clumsy error when Maxim De Cuyper drives a shot against the post after stealing your misplaced pass. And then the rebound smacks against Victor Lindelof and into the net.A devastating cocktail of ineptitude and misfortune doomed Villa to their heaviest Premier League defeat since May 2024. They allowed 21 shots from the Seagulls, a combined 3.67 xG raining down on Marco Bizot’s goal. This wasn’t even a case of Brighton racking up the shots and goals after Joao Gomes’ brainless act of violent conduct. Four goals and a man up, Brighton took pity on their beleaguered visitors. Had they not, this could have been a cricket score.
Up next it is the champions Arsenal at Villa Park with Tottenham, Newcastle and Manchester City all to play in their first eight games. This could get bad. All the more so given that their squad makes Harrenhal look like an edifice that is holding itself together rather nicely. Youri Tielemans, Morgan Rogers, Lucas Digne and Ezri Konsa have gone. Emiliano Martinez has long wanted a way out. Al-Hilal want to sign Ollie Watkins (they are also in talks to sign Gabriel Martinelli). His absence from the squad was greeted with “silence” by Emery. Some of those players have already been replaced; the gaps left by others will require rapid movement in a market that knows Villa are under pressure. This really is a recipe for panic.LiverpoolPanic meter: 🚨A point at St. James’ Park is not the sort of result that really merits an assessment from the panic meter, even for a team with ambitions as lofty as Liverpool’s. The point was only theirs when a late foul by the otherwise excellent Lewis Hall handed Dominik Szoboszlai a chance to equalize from the spot but the visitors had been building the pressure to earn themselves a 2-2 draw with Newcastle.There were factors to like, signs that new coach Andoni Iraola might have made an immediate impact. Of the 18 teams that have played in the Premier League so far, Manchester City allowed the second fewest passes between their lines with 33. Liverpool allowed just 20. Their new coach enjoyed great success at Bournemouth by suffocating his opponents with pressure. If that works with forwards of Liverpool’s talent, then good things might await.
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The worry came when Newcastle did succeed with one of those few passes through the Liverpool lines. Iraola has decided to play without a conventional sitting midfielder and give license for Szoboszlai and Ryan Gravenberch to push up. His fullbacks get to bomb on with the ball. You could fit a flotilla through the gaps that emerged in the visiting defense when Newcastle won the ball back quickly.Iraola knows left back Milos Kerkez well from their time at Bournemouth and got great success with him as almost a wing back in a four. Jeremie Frimpong was less wing back at Bayer Leverkusen than shadow striker coming in off the right wing. In the Bundesliga, he had the recovery pace to catch almost everyone in the division. In his final season there was only one player quicker. Last year with Liverpool there were 26. A few of them were in this Newcastle side and the speed with which they countered for Joe Willock’s goal.This would not be news to Iraola. The worry here stems less from Newcastle finding something out about Liverpool than having so clearly exposed the insecurity of this group of players when they are out of possession. Given time, they will learn their triggers better, they will press as more of a unit and they will puzzle out how to compensate when the opponent does quickly turn the ball over. For now, however, Liverpool looked vulnerable at the back against a team with a severely weakened attack. Don’t consider this panic. More a ringing sensation in the ear. We just don’t have a meter for that.
TottenhamPanic meter: 🚨In principle, Spurs should be at double alarm status. Their loss to Brentford was a battering, one where Roberto De Zerbi’s side seemed to bounce out of every aerial duel and where their commitment to drawing the press in the manager’s fashion simply invited turnovers in dangerous areas. Make no mistake, a dozen games from now we could be looking back on events at the Gtech Stadium saying the writing was on the wall from the first moment.
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Having stated that, there are reasons to believe the upswing should come fairly soon. Perhaps only three of Saturday’s XI figure to be starters when De Zerbi has his full complement of players. In defense, only Jan Paul van Hecke profiles as a likely starter while a somewhat sparky cameo from Mateus Fernandes suggests it won’t be long before he and Sandro Tonali are lining up in midfield together. Then there is the transfer business yet to be done, most notably the impending double addition of Omar Marmoush and Savinho from Tottenham. However good they may be, they are probably improvements on Richarlison, Conor Gallagher or, for now at least, Mikey Moore.The panic meter for some Spurs supporters might have spiked higher if they got particularly carried away by the spending spree that looks set to clear half a billion dollars once concluded. Combine that expenditure with Tottenham’s “Big Six” status and you could be forgiven for thinking that a swing at the Champions League places might have been on the cards. It is worth reaffirming that it was not some fluke set of circumstances that had injury-hit Spurs 17th two years in a row. Standards had been allowed to slip. Their football last season was of a level that could very well have got them relegated.
Their $500 million has been invested in players on the fringes of far better teams and good players from the Premier League mid-table and lower. Blend that with what Tottenham already had and do you really expect a top four or five team to emerge overnight, or even a side better than a settled, developing Brentford outfit?Manchester UnitedPanic meter: 🚨🚨On the opening day of the season, against an opponent who doubtless had a point to prove after being roundly dismissed, strange things can happen to a team like Manchester United. Here’s the crux of the worry for United, though. Even though strange things happen, they really shouldn’t happen against Hull City, certainly not when it looks so easy for a side who had the 23rd best xG difference in the Championship last season. It is not like the Tigers went out and recruited a team that would put them on a level with a Champions League qualifier.And yet United found themselves outmuscled and overpowered on Humberside. Through Sunday’s games, no team had a lower duel success rate than Michael Carrick’s, who came out second best to Hull in 57.6% of their clashes. Almost to a man they looked undercooked and this is a team that is soon going to have three games a week, affording precious little time to build fitness. For all the limits of their talent, Hull found weaknesses in the United defense that will not easily be addressed.
“We watch Man United three times, one time live, and we saw their problems, and we tried to use this,” stated Hull boss Sergej Jakirovic. Outlining those issues he had explained earlier: “Manchester United is coming very high with Luke Shaw. Also, they try to overload the midfield. So, in the first hour, our main task is to close this gap between the lines, and then, when we steal the ball, we are very vertical, very quick.”Also, in those transitions, we try to switch the side because our wing-backs are completely alone, and then get numbers in the box. We had two very good chances, and also we didn’t allow any one-to-one 100 per cent chances from them.” Hull got their wing backs forward and once Patrick Dorgu went off, no one in the United attack was going to track them. Expect others to go to this approach in the weeks ahead.
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Meanwhile, there is the issue of set pieces, one that has hovered in the background at Old Trafford in recent years. Allowing 0.4 expected goals per game from dead balls since the start of the 2023-24 season does not reflect well on United’s dead ball defense. The fact that it held at that level amid last season’s explosion in offensive output when play stops is, at best, cold comfort, particularly after Semi Ajayi and Nobel Mendy bullied them in the air.
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