Angeball, Everton, plus Man Utd and Arsenal midfielders among those on borrowed time

The Premier League is a tough school. It’s no place for the faint of heart, and even at this early stage of the 2024/25 season there are already plenty of players, managers, clubs and even ideas or abstract concepts that appear to be living on borrowed time.

Here are some such things, by happenstance totalling a convenient 10 as such things always must.

Angeball
Been quite surprised to learn Below The Line this week that an awful lot of people really do still seem to think this might still work despite the mounting pile of evidence to the contrary. A pile that is now so big it’s surely about to topple over like Spurs defending a set-piece.

We think the split might be quite simple here. If you’re not a Spurs fan you might a) only watch them occasionally and b) not be instinctively predisposed and hardwired to predict and expect the worst and Spursiest outcome at all times.

Both feel like important points. If you only watch Spurs occasionally, then it must be said that their way of losing games can to the untrained eye look quite unlucky in one-off games. ‘They had so much possession, so much territory, so many half-chances! And then lose to a goal from a set-piece/counter-attack! That is rotten luck! But if they persevere with this method it must come good, surely!’

Thing is, they’ve been persevering with this method for quite a long time now and apart from that absurd 10-game start (itself far luckier than has often been acknowledged) that set up all the necessary confirmation bias that first impressions are wont to do, it… hasn’t worked very often. At all. And is if anything working less and less.

Angeball secured Spurs 26 points from their first 10 games and 44 points from the subsequent 32 games. And the trend is ever downward: it’s 17 points in the last 15, and 10 in the last 11. Only Everton and Wolves have lost more games since March.

And those defeats are all starting to look very similar. It remains possible that something undefined will ‘click’ and that sterile domination will turn into clear chances and goals on a more regular basis than one game in four. It could, we suppose, really just be the worst run of bad luck in football history.

But Occam’s razor does now very much suggest that good and even average teams have now worked out how to cope with the shock and awe of Angeball, leaving only the dregs of the division to catch up. In the last six months, Spurs’ only Premier League wins have come against three teams now relegated plus Nottingham Forest and Everton.

And we’re not at all convinced they would beat Nottingham Forest if they played them today.

Gary O’Neil
It’s already been a curious managerial career. A kind of accidental career, taking two massive hospital passes in succession from Bournemouth and Wolves.

Bournemouth had just been paddled 9-0 by Liverpool and told to expect more of the same by manager Scott Parker in a post-match interview that handily doubled up as an exit interview. O’Neil kept them up in some style before the club decided to gamble – so far successfully – on the more experienced and undeniably higher-ceilinged Andoni Iraola.

That left O’Neil in the right place at the right time (or wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how you look at it) to rock up at Wolves just before the season began when Julen Lopetegui huffed off because player sales had seen the rug pulled from under him. O’Neil kept them up easily enough too, and was doing such a good job that an English media already kindly disposed towards him for having been so harshly unseated by a foreign at his previous job started linking him with Manchester United and, crazier still, meaning it.

Since that time, Wolves have picked up six points from a possible 42. O’Neil, handed his first chance at an actual pre-season in a managerial job, instead spent it watching the rug that was pulled out from under Lopetegui being pulled out again from under him. Does that work? It’s a different rug, really, isn’t it? Different but similar anyway. The point is, he lost his most reliable defender and most creative attacking player in Max Kilman and Pedro Neto, and now Wolves look all shades of f***ed.

Once relegation becomes a serious threat, and we’d contend that point has been reached, O’Neil is going to get very vulnerable very quickly. He’s still not a big and established name, and his two acts of rescuing other people’s mess might not be enough to convince Wolves to let him clear up his own. Even though it’s not entirely his fault either.

And where does he go next? Jumping into another firefighting job at one of the other assorted Premier League teams in relegation-haunted decay – Tottenham, perhaps? – couldn’t be ruled out entirely but if we were betting men we’d have our two quid on ‘Speaking Well, I Thought, on Monday Night Football before taking a job at an ambitious Championship outfit.’

Everton Football Club
Let’s be real, they’ve been pushing their luck in multiple ways pretty much since the Premier League began, haven’t they? It’s absolutely extraordinary that they’re still here, frankly, and we cannot think of anything more Everton than finally losing their fingertip grip on top-flight status at the precise moment they move into a brand spanking new stadium.

There’s a grimly forlorn feel to it all at the moment, a club that has thrown itself in full square behind the oft joyless stylings of Dycheball only to find that the great man can’t even shut the back door on a 2-0 lead anymore. In which case, the question very quickly becomes what is actually the point of any of it?

You still sort of think Everton will be fine in the end because they always seem to be but there really couldn’t be any complaint if it turns out this season really is one time to the well too many. And it might be a long road back for a club whose on-field woes remain dwarfed by the off-field mess that permanently engulfs them these days.

Casemiro
Been on borrowed time for ages, obviously, but that time is now assuredly up. Didn’t make the starting XI at St Mary’s on Saturday despite Erik ten Hag opting to stick new signing Manuel Ugarte on the bench as well, which seems unlikely to the case long term.

Casemiro is now at best fourth choice in United’s midfield and while he continue to get minutes here and there as he did on Saturday, there appears almost no chance he ever again regains the status of significant figure in United’s plans. And if he does, things have gone very wrong for United.

The cameos here and there will ensure that the disaster-class against Liverpool won’t be his final act in a United shirt, which is a kindness, but it now looks almost certain to be the last thing he does that anyone remembers. A surprise, really, that he isn’t in Saudi already.

Jorginho
Whether it was Arsenal’s Plan A, B, C or whatever, the ultimately match-winning approach at Spurs this weekend was one that didn’t require Arsenal to have too much of the ball. Which, given Jorginho’s apparent eagerness to give it away, was just as well.

His was a miserable afternoon spent having his pocket pinched, while being rushed and harried in a way that gave the alarming impression of a man whose legs can no longer operate at the speed required in Our League.

There’s plenty of merit to a mitigating argument of rustiness for a player who was getting his first minutes of the season, but the counterpoint to that is how and where will he shed that rust given just how far down the pecking order he now finds himself. Arsenal were arguably without the entirety of what will be their first-choice midfield three this season, and Jorginho was conspicuously the weakest of the three deployed in their stead at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Add to that the fact that Spurs themselves are immensely daft (see above) and thus populated their midfield with a ball-playing number six and a pair of pure number 10s, and the fact Jorginho was so utterly overwhelmed becomes an ever more acute concern.

His standing and leadership qualities remain undimmed – and the fact a player making his first appearance of the season in such a key fixture was handed the captain’s armband says something – but decline can come alarmingly fast in his situation. He’s 32, out of nick and unlikely to get the chances required to crank himself back up to full speed any time soon.

Barclaysmen
It’s been great fun, it’s had a great run, we’ve all enjoyed it, but these things always burn gloriously yet fleetingly. If you haven’t yet got your video of Rory Delap long throws soundtracked by Hard-Fi out there on the socials by now then your chance has surely gone.

Proceed with it now and you’re at grave risk of yours ending up alongside a piggybacking effort by Bastard Multinational Inc. whose social team have missed the trend, failed to understand it and are as we speak busy putting together a video of Wayne Rooney or Thierry Henry with Don’t Look Back In Anger in the background.

The moment has passed.

The Invincibles
All right, they’ll still be the Invincibles. They’re not quite on borrowed time in that sense. But they are surely at serious risk of no longer being unique. It’s just about the only thing City haven’t ticked off under Pep Guardiola, isn’t it? An unbeaten league season?

With Arsenal the only other team even halfway ready for a title challenge this season, and City having seemingly at long last moved away from their baffling insistence on losing to Spurs at least once a season, they’ll perhaps never have a better chance to do it than this season.

Plus, who out there can honestly say that a team going unbeaten all season but then being relegated anyway because they have all 102 of their points taken off them wouldn’t be one of the greatest acts of Barclays ever known?

All remaining goalscoring records
If, however, City manage to avoid being booted out of the Premier League, then all eyes will be on Erling Haaland and his absurdly rapid pursuit of all the Premier League goalscoring records. He’s been here five minutes and is already on 72 goals – just 13 short of Fernando Actual Torres and the top 50 of the all-time list.

After that, the names within his reach before the year is out very quickly get very silly. At present speed and course he’ll go past Dennis Bergkamp’s Premier League tally by Christmas.

His current overall rate of Premier League goalscoring for City would leave him needing about another 200 games to go past Alan Shearer’s 260-goal benchmark.

But it’s silly to use all the old data in that. Makes much more sense surely to use the most recent form for our calculations. He’s scoring 2.25 goals per game this season, and assuming as we must that he keeps that up then he needs only another 84 matches to reach top spot. That’s roughly halfway through the season after next that he’ll be knocking Shearer off his perch, then.

Newcastle’s start
Straightforward this. They’ve been assorted shades of rubbish in all four of their games this season and yet have purloined 10 points from those games. They went down to 10 and scraped past Southampton, were enormously fortunate to escape Bournemouth with a point, met Spurs at their abject silliest and then had to come from behind to beat a Wolves team that hasn’t won a match now for what feels like decades.

It’s unsustainable. One way or another, something about that has to change. Either Newcastle’s performances are going to have to start matching up to the results, or the results are going to start trending down to match the performances.

And it always feels like one of those options is more likely than the other. Nick Pope is only one man.

Todd Boehly or Behdad Eghbali
We just don’t know which one. Nobody does. But there doesn’t seem to be any way the current power struggle ends with both still holding their current portion of the power. Also, we don’t really know who holds what current portion of power.

That’s been one of the fun things about it, allowing the absolutist tribal bunfights of social media to form two rival factions each convinced their man is responsible for the good things Chelsea have done (i.e. signing Cole Palmer) while being undermined by the other idiot doing all the bad things (i.e. everything else).

Only when one of these combatants is removed will we finally learn once and for all who was right, with the only certainty that absolutely on either side of this intra-club divide will concede one inch of ground no matter what body of evidence may appear before them.