Zimpapers Logo

By Barry Glendenning

THIS season’s Premier League. Remember it? It kicked off back in August before taking a six- week hiatus so we could all enjoy the first ever winter World Cup. Well, it’s back on Boxing Day, so now seems as good a time as any to provide a quick primer for readers who, like this column, may have been so preoccupied by events in Doha they’ve been paying scant attention to goings on closer to home.

Consider it born out of our surprise upon discovering that Liverpool winger Luis Díaz could be out for the rest of the season with the recurrence of a knee injury his manager Jürgen Klopp has described as a “proper smash in the face”. Or knee, presumably.

Liverpool have also been unsettled by the revelation their sporting director Julian Ward has announced he will be leaving the club at the end of the season, just a year after taking up the job. More a kick in the nuts than a smash in the face, the announcement comes at a time when the club owners Fenway Sports Group are considering a sale of their cash cow.

And while we say mid-season, it isn’t really because all 20 teams have only played up to 15 games. Arsenal remain the unlikely league leaders even though nobody, least of all their own fans, seems prepared to even remotely entertain the notion they might actually win it. Despite their exalted position and five-point lead over Manchester City, it is Pep Guardiola’s reigning champions who remain red-hot favourites to retain their title.

Just two points behind them in third, Newcastle are looking an increasingly less preposterous bet to “do a Leicester” at outlandishly generous odds. Having said that, Manchester City striker Erling Haaland has been plugged into the mains for six weeks and is fully recharged, although his industrious but considerably less prolific Arsenal counterpart Gabriel Jesus has been ruled out for three months.

It’s all change at Bournemouth, whose protracted takeover by elderly Las Vegas billionaire Bill Foley has finally been ratified by the Premier League. The American’s first order of business was to make Gary O’Neil’s role as caretaker manager permanent, despite reported talks with Marcelo Bielsa about the position. Foley’s takeover means that more than half of the Premier League’s clubs now have minority or majority American shareholders, many of whom remain decidedly unpopular with fans, some of whom would prefer new sugar daddies from the Middle East.

Elsewhere on the south coast, less forgetful readers may remember that Southampton have finally sacked Ralph Hasenhüttl, in a state of affairs that will come as good news of for those of us who can never remember if it’s “Hasenhüttl” with one “s” or two. His highly regarded replacement, Nathan Jones, won just six out of 38 games the last time he left Luton Town and Saints fans will be desperate for a better return now that Jones has departed Kenilworth Road for the second time.

At the third time of asking, Wolves have finally appointed Julen Lopetegui, who got off too a winning start in the Carabao Cup on Tuesday and will take charge of his first league match on Boxing Day. The premier league’s bottom side travel to play Everton in freewill, who have lost five of their past seven games.

The favourite to be next to top flight manager out of a job, Frank Lampard could do with a result at Goodison Park, not least because Everton travel to Manchester City on New Year’s Eve. Back-to-back defeats could spell the end for “Lamps” before Everton fans settle down in front of Jools Holland’s Hootenanny to ring in 2023, a year in which they will be hoping for more than the nine league wins they’ve racked up so far in the past 12 months.

Meanwhile at Chelsea, there are already faint murmurs of discontent regarding Graham Potter, despite his managerial tenure at the club being just 14 games old. Having poached his former club’s entire coaching staff and head of recruitment, the former Brighton manager saw his side embarrassed upon his return to the Amex Stadium in late October. He has since overseen consecutive league defeats against Arsenal and Newcastle that leave Chelsea an unacceptable eighth in the table.

Having missed 11 months of last year with a knee injury, the luckless Leicester City defender James Justin will almost certainly sit out the rest of this campaign after rupturing his achilles. After being restricted to just one league appearance for West Ham before Qatar 2022, Nayef Aguerd is once again an injury doubt for his team’s trip to Arsenal on Boxing Day. On the plus side, at least West Ham fans recently got to see how good he is even if it was while playing for Morocco in Qatar.

Ronaldo Cristiano

Newcastle fans are sweating over the fitness of Alexander Isak, while the post-World Cup wellbeing of Richarlison and Rodrigo Bentancur is causing palpitations for those at Spurs. Fulham’s Neeskens Kebano faces a long spell on the sidelines after rupturing his achilles and the USA’s hugely impressive young skipper Tyler Adams will be absent from the Leeds United side to host Manchester City next week as he sits the game out on the naughty step after being sent off in the madcap 4-3 defeat at Tottenham before the World Cup, another classic pre-World Cup game we have probably allforgotten.

And so to Old Trafford, where Manchester United are once again preparing for life after Cristiano Ronaldo, who severed ties with the club while enduring a particularly miserable World Cup. It was recently announced that Jadon Sancho has been sent to the Netherlands to train with a crack team of experts tasked with getting a tune out of a player who has inexplicably underwhelmed.

In the boardroom, the ever unpopular Glazers have announced they are going forward with “their process” of securing new investors or nailing down a potential sale. It did not go unnoticed that Joel Glazer, with whom the buck stops regarding all decisions at Old Trafford, was seen at the World Cup glad-handing potential Arab investors. That or he has developed a hitherto well-hidden love of football, a sport he has shown no obvious interest in since his late father first started hosing other people’s money at United in 2003. Consider yourself vaguely briefed, now enjoy the football. — Guardian Football