Daniel Storey: Classy starts and a brewing crisis mark Premier League's opening weekend
Liverpool and Leeds United players line up prior to the beginning of the Premier League match. Picture: Shaun Botterill/NMC Pool/PA Wire
For a moment, we could forget about the limitations of this season. Nothing can replicate the atmosphere of a full ground, supporters beginning a season with new hope, new expectations and new doubt, but that only increases the onus on the football to help atone for the vacuum.
At Anfield on Saturday evening, we were transfixed as Liverpool and Leeds United clanged and clashed like an amateur one-man band.
Three times Leeds hauled themselves level having tripped themselves up. Three times they exposed flaws in Liverpool’s defending that were absent for almost all of last season.
Three times they resolved to get back into the game through a deep commitment to their manager’s ideals. Three times we tingled in anticipation that this verve may last all season.
Pray it does. There is some merit to the argument that Marcelo Bielsa produces a rare strand of fawning, but it happens for a reason. We have grown accustomed to promoted clubs arriving into the Premier League with a predictable natural ceiling and floor on their ambition and expectation, but for Leeds neither exists.
Nobody knows whether they will sink or swim, fly or crash. For the neutral, in the centre of that uncertainty lies the sweet spot.
It takes a special brand of incompetence to have your club firmly ensconced in crisis 90 minutes into a new season, but were you planning a self-inflicted sabotage there are few owners better suited to your strategy than Davids Gold and Sullivan. A week after West Ham entered mutiny mode, they lost 2-0 at home to Newcastle United. Pick 10 West Ham supporters at random and you’ll be lucky to include one who believes that they will stay up with comfort.
West Ham’s biggest issue is that they have a squad packed with exotic attacking midfielders who were tempted to sign for the money and the location as much as the ambition and are now proving unsurprisingly difficult to shift. And so the rot spreads.
Sympathy for Felipe Anderson, Andriy Yarmolenko and Pablo Fornals will be thin on the ground, but watching West Ham forlornly attempt to get back into the contest against Newcastle you can see their point. The ball repeatedly sailed over their heads, sent long into the penalty area for Sebastien Haller to try and win a header and Michail Antonio to feed off any scraps. If this is the masterplan, it lacked imagination and innovation; Newcastle’s defenders were happy to head clear.
Moyes must now find an answer, to the attacking bluntness and to the dismal mood. One of the indirect results of this relentless season is that momentum becomes more crucial with shorter gaps between matches than usual. Right now, West Ham are only going one way.
Given the chaotic nature of their previous Premier League season, you can fully understand why Scott Parker might prefer things to be a little quieter in 2020/21. Acclimatising players signed when the season has already started is tough; bringing in more than half a new team might be impossible.
But Fulham supporters will have been concerned at the ease in which Arsenal scored each of their three goals on Saturday. Three of their four defenders started almost half the 2018/19 season together in the top flight, and on this evidence not much has changed. Fulham will face far less potent attacks than Arsenal’s this season, but they also require a massive jump in final-third cohesion and defensive responsibility. Fail to do so, and it will be a long nine months.
If Arsenal’s biggest issue last season was chance creation and defensive solidity, Mikel Arteta might well have found solutions to both problems. Gabriel Magalhães looked assured on debut, not easy considering the new country, culture, club and system. Alongside him, Rob Holding continued his renaissance and may well be first-choice ahead of David Luiz.
Further up the pitch, Willian was the star. If he gets credited with an assist for Arsenal’s first goal he becomes their joint-second highest league assist provider in 2020 after one game. The manner in which he dropped deep to interchange play or arrow crossfield passes to Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang suggests that he could be the link player Arteta’s Arsenal so desperately needed. Suddenly there is substantial competition for places to accompany Aubameyang in the front three.
Part of the joy of a new Premier League season is seeing how new arrivals bed in to new teams and, often, new football cultures. Willian already feels at home in England, but there were also debut goals for Gabriel, Callum Wilson, Jeff Hendrick and Timothy Castagne.
The most intriguing summer signing of all is James Rodriguez, once the darling of world football but a man whose career burned up under the bright lights in Madrid and Munich. On Merseyside, he has a chance to inject some superstardom into an Everton attacking midfield that barely got past serviceable last season.
The early signs were good. James has that ability shared by all technically brilliant midfielders to create an extra half-second through his touch, vision and body position. Time and again he drifted infield with quick feet and curled a ball out to the left wing, hovering on the edge of the box in case a chance came his way. Anyone who watched Everton regularly last season knows Carlo Ancelotti needed to buy a new midfield, and that is precisely what he has done in the space of six weeks. James, playing under his favourite manager, could be the jewel.
