Alrighty. I’m going to experiment with a bit of a new blog post structure. In the last few posts, I’ve really been focused on a few matches, rather than the matchday. Consequently, there’s a lot of information that I could be giving, but I haven’t been. This week, we’ll start off with the scores of the matchday and shed some light on a few, particularly surprising and/or important matchups.

Scores:

Southampton v Aston Villa: 1-2                Arsenal v Watford: 1-0

Brighton v Newcastle: 2-1                           Everton v. Spurs: 0-0

Crystal Palace v. Wolves:  2-0                    Leeds v. Leicester: 1-1

Chelsea v. Burnley: 1-1                                  West Ham v. Liverpool: 3-2

Man Utd v. Man City: 0-2                            Bretford v. Norwich: 1-2

I’ve bolded the matches that I’d like to focus on in today’s blog post starting with Manchester United v. Manchester City.

Manchester United v. Manchester City

Manchester United started the match terribly. There’s really not much more to say there. Seven minutes into the match, Joao Cancelo’s (Man City) low cross was converted into an own goal as one of Manchester United’s defenders raced back to clear the ball. As the game progressed, it was clear that Manchester United was struggling. Not to delve too deep into the statistics, but oftentimes, you can tell who will win a soccer game based on possession, and in this game, the possession was seriously one-sided.

As the first half came to a close, Man City was able to put another goal in the back of the net making it 2-0 going into the second half. Despite the changes made to the personnel on the field and tactically, Manchester United could not pull through, and the game ended in a 2-0 win for Manchester United.

Following the match, manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was under intense pressure, as it was said that he was at risk of losing his job. He was quoted to have said, “Some praise has to go to them but we were not at our level. Standards need to be raised, We need to be on the front foot. I can’t look at myself and say this is the way I want Man Utd to play, I have good quiet communication all the time with the club. I want the best for Manchester United. As long as I’m here, I want to do what I can do to improve this.”

Only the coming games will tell if Solskajer will be able to retain his job.

In other news, next week’s matchups should be very interesting, especially given what they mean for standings. Four teams have changed their managers, so the upcoming matches will be used as assessments of the managers’ ability to successfully direct the respective teams.

Matchups to look forward to:

Liverpool v. Arsenal

Man Utd v. Watford

Leicester v. Chelsea

More to come next week!