Manchester United have made Michael Carrick simultaneously completely sackable and entirely unsackable through their own incompetence.

Fun weekend, that.

Premier League winners

Bournemouth
Didn’t seem to play. Can’t see an evaluation of their weekend performance, or even any indication or proof of a result, anywhere. Perhaps they were as busy as the rest of us watching Manchester United’s 3-0 defeat to existential dread.

Bournemouth will not mind getting the A Word, Too, For treatment in their relegation to perhaps the eighth biggest talking point from Old Trafford. They’re probably used to it, having won 3-0 there on three of their last four visits, drawing the other 4-4.

Many a morose This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About Here Gary Neville monologue has played out to the backing track of the Cherries celebrating in the dressing room.

Hell, even the first four paragraphs of this entry on Bournemouth have largely been dedicated to the team they embarrassed once more. It’s an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of a doom-based news cycle.

But Bournemouth deserve flowers they know they’re not going to get. In the space of four days they have beaten AC Milan, Manchester United and their combined 10 European Cups 6-0 on aggregate. They have scored 11 goals since they last conceded. Evanilson is Roberto Firmino reborn. Lewis Cook is on the Alex Scott diet. Adam Smith will be playing at right-back when the apocalypse wipes out human civilisation.

It has been a stunning turnaround from the Chelsea defeat, at which point the Bournemouth outlook was especially bleak.

The focus then was on Chelsea’s excellence as it is now on Manchester United’s haplessness. That is the cross Premier League overachievers must perennially bear. Bournemouth won’t mind being left to enjoy the greatest week in their existence alone.

Arsenal
A clean-sheet win with both centre-halves scoring, one scrappily from a corner and one assisted by a centre-half retooled as a full-back, with Mikel Arteta being booked for leaving his technical area, and subsequently revealing that he has been compiling a dossier of evidence on managers going unpunished for the doing the same.

If Arsenal could specifically plan a performance and result designed to feed into the caricature of this team while actually underlining its control over the majority of their opponents, it wouldn’t look much different.

Aston Villa
The eternal scourge of table-toppers: Villa are unbeaten in their last four games at home to the Premier League leaders, winning three of those games.

They are second in the Champions League table with a perfect record after three games. They are the only team to beat Manchester City in the Premier League since mid-January. They have Manchester United glancing over longingly at “the best manager in the Premier League”. They have withstood their characteristic early-season wobble and look as strong as ever. They have Nicolas Jackson.

Spurs
‘Here was 90 minutes of compelling De Zerbiball. This is what his very expensive team should look like. This is exactly how they should play.’ said one humble and possibly quite giddy scribe, drunk on the sheer power of Mateus Fernandes’ housery.

16 Conclusions on a Spurs win are about as rare as them emerging victorious from Stamford Bridge, so do dig in.

Newcastle
Dan Burn, in all fairness, is an absolutely massive comfort blanket to reach for in inclement conditions. His first start of the season – and to be fair, Crystal Palace’s continued awfulness – coincided with Newcastle’s most convincing defensive performance.

It took time to click further forward but as depressing a sentence as it might be sometimes, Will Osula and Harvey Barnes are Newcastle’s best finishers and were able to maximise their chances when they came.

The most forgettable of victories was nevertheless entirely necessary to begin Matthias Jaissle’s process of restoring the faith. If he can transition seamlessly between leaning on those old faces and starting to embed a few new, younger ones, there is hope.

Oscar Bobb
Having described his first Premier League goal as “a lifelong dream”, Bobb might not have expected to wait over 1,000 days for his second. Nor for it to be assisted by Josh King rather than Kevin de Bruyne. But his career catalogue might be among the most high quality in world football as a result.

Bobb was quite comfortably the most expensive January recruit still yet to score in the Premier League for his new club, costing Fulham roughly three times what Bournemouth paid for Alex Toth.

There were few more opportune moments to end that wait than the 80th minute of a goalless game the Cottagers really could have done with winning.

Bobb’s only previous top-flight strike was named Premier League Goal of the Month; Jack Rudoni would vouch for the Norwegian going two for two with that footwork and agility.

Andoni Iraola
In the entirety of last season, Arsenal were the only team to beat Brighton, Brentford and Bournemouth. It took Iraola’s knowledge of the inner workings of the Premier League’s Bermuda Triangle to manage that feat within eight games of his Liverpool reign.

Iraola hasn’t lost a match in 90 minutes with 11 players on the pitch since January 3. The implosion against Manchester City at Anfield came after Ryan Gravenberch was sent off.

The Spaniard’s transformation of Liverpool into a grittier, more relentless and hard-working team with ample individual quality to help decide games has gone under the radar.

Ronald Araujo
Already on the podium of the greatest Liverpool loanees ever – and arguably top of a ranking based purely on popularity with the fanbase. No player has won more aerial duels while lying down this season.

The El Hadji Diouf equivalent Liverpool sign after turning Araujo’s buy option down is up against it.

Exequiel Palacios
There is a whiff of the Esteban Cambiassos around Palacios: a seasoned, cultured, Argentine midfield dictator, the polar bear in the proverbial Arlington, Texas of a Premier League relegation battle with a team in blue, who replaced a beloved manager with one supposedly doomed in the summer.

The point here is to congratulate Ipswich on winning the Premier League title next season when Palacios moves on after a year of transmitting his knowledge to the squad, to be replaced by an unknown, diminutive and amiable Frenchman.

Ipswich signing a World Cup winner of Palacios’ calibre, at peak age, for less than £20m in an exploded transfer market for midfielder fees, represents the recruitment learnings the Tractor Boys have implemented from their previous top-flight spell, when not one single non-British or Irish outfielder came in.

Hull
Not since falling to Ipswich and Millwall in the space of five bruising March days have Hull suffered consecutive league defeats. Only five current top-flight clubs are on longer runs without back-to-back league losses; Arsenal are not among them.

“I feel good because the players showed an excellent reaction after last weekend,” said Sergej Jakirovic of a squad adept at rolling with the punches, taking responsibility and not letting one-off negative results spiral into something more fundamental.

Premier League losers

Manchester United
Whatever the antithesis of a lightning rod for criticism is, Michael Carrick has become that symbolic figure at Manchester United. The blundering executives in charge of his appointment perhaps underestimated his connection with the supporters almost as much as they grossly miscalculated both their own decision-making abilities, and their insulation from condemnation.

Carrick is the opposite of a scapegoat or fall guy, the inverse of the well-speaking face of the company INEOS might have hoped could be wheeled out for cheap nostalgia applause. His reputation with the fans, if anything, has been strengthened by this execrable season.

The sudden change in sentiment and volume when he disappeared down the tunnel at Old Trafford on Sunday was remarkable. Carrick was given an ovation and a rendition of his own song from the stands after a 3-0 defeat, but the second he faded from view the opprobrium directed towards the players was startling.

He is, if anything, a welcome distraction preventing an already acerbic atmosphere from turning worse. The majority of fans likely know he is underperforming and out of his depth, but to them Carrick represents an identity entirely eroded by INEOS and the Glazers.

And to that end he is arguably the most sackable, unsackable manager in Premier League history. One win in 10 games across three competitions is not survivable in ordinary conditions for a Manchester United coach, but if things seemed toxic after the Bournemouth loss then just imagine the abuse aimed at the players, the owners and those in the boardroom if they push out the one individual fans actually feel an association with.

Sunderland and Leeds
That wasn’t very Super Sunday of you.

Fabian Hurzeler
A reminder that any time Brighton lose, they are still the moral victors as “only one team” invariably tried to play football, and it always just so happens to be his.

‘The message has belatedly landed, with Jordan Henderson’s presence as the designated driver perhaps no coincidence when it comes to Chelsea players making better life choices. A really quite vexed Moises Caicedo was itching to take off his gloves and throw down with Jack Grealish as early as the third minute until Henderson jogged into frame, tapped him on the chest and beckoned him away.

‘Any iteration of Chelsea over the last few seasons might have won, lost or drawn that game; the only guarantee is that they would have done so with 10 men at most.’

Ah. In their very next game Chelsea imploded, had an 11th different player since the start of last season sent off and Henderson, who berated a prone Conor Gallagher after he’d been hacked by Morgan Rogers, did nothing to rein them in.

Honestly, Chelsea can now field a semi-competent starting XI of players who have been shown a red card for them since June 2025: Robert Sanchez, Malo Gusto, Trevoh Chalobah, Wesley Fofana (twice), Marc Cucurella, Pedro Neto, Moises Caicedo, Cole Palmer, Nicolas Jackson, Liam Delap and Joao Pedro. With Enzo Maresca, sent off against Liverpool last October, watching from the stands.

 

Everton
In the interests of fairness, this was in last week’s column too:

‘That five-word, Nike and EA Sports mangling of a David Moyes motto will never not infuriate a fanbase on such an afternoon. The prospect of Everton Just Staying In The Game before an ultimately limp defeat at the Emirates next weekend is positively titillating.’

Clockwork.

Pierre Sage
Apparently not very good at Premier League management, but also a victim of an increasing Premier League trend which helped snare Ange Postecoglou and Ruben Amorim.

Gianluigi Donnarumma and Marc Guehi
Since the start of last season, the only outfielder to make more errors leading to goals in the Premier League than Guehi (three) is Jan Paul van Hecke (four).

Since the start of last season, the only goalkeepers to make more errors leading to goals in the Premier League than Donnarumma (three) are Robin Roefs (four) and Bart Verbruggen (five).

Since the start of last season, four Manchester City players have made errors leading to goals in the Premier League. The other two, James Trafford and John Stones, are no longer with them.

With Enzo Maresca unable to so ruthlessly move on from either member of his four-man captaincy group, it remains to be seen whether he can find coaching solutions to such a consistent weakness in two starters’ games.

Nottingham Forest
Third from bottom in an actual Premier League table; third in a Premier League table based on expected points, as comfortably the biggest underachievers relative to performance.

There is some sympathy for Oliver Glasner, the second highest-paid manager in the top flight. But those remunerating him also might expect more than five wins in his last 31 Premier League games in charge of Nottingham Forest and the Austrian’s beloved Crystal Palace, even if he is coaching wins his players cannot deliver.

Coventry
No club has had more of their Premier League games this season end 1-0 than Coventry (four), but Frank Lampard’s delight at the Sky Blues’ mastery of The Basics to keep it tight – the Brighton massacre aside – will be tempered by only one of those coin flips landing in their favour.

It doesn’t help that Coventry have played just two matches against teams who started the day lower than them in the table, and lost both. Nor that next week pits their 19th-placed selves against rock-bottom Sunderland.

Brentford
It does feel like Vitaly Janelt’s second yellow card against Liverpool was an unnecessary and avoidable consequence of Yehor Yarmoliuk’s daft red.

The game was lost, the risk-reward factor weighed absurdly heavy in favour of the former, and the Bees were already without one suspended starting midfielder for the trip to Hull before captain Janelt took himself out of the equation for Hull too.

A double pivot of Mamadou Sangare making his first Premier League start in six weeks, and Aaron Hickey making his second central midfield start ever, resulted in a performance lacking control and authority.

Brentford already struggle without Janelt. During his eight-game lay-off towards the end of last season they drew five, lost one and beat two relegated teams in West Ham and Burnley. The Bees could have handled one midfield ban, but two was too much.