Johnny Nicholson: Box office Liverpool an awesome sight

Liverpool's Naby Keita (centre) celebrates with team-mates after scoring their side's third goal of the game

Magnificent Liverpool

Playing Liverpool must be so frustrating for the opposition. Crystal Palace could’ve been two up after 10 minutes, but failed to take their chances. But then the Reds always give you one, two or three opportunities.

They rarely look totally secure at the back and they’d let in two in midweek but, on this form, they are simply devastating in the last third and that is where their power lies. They keep on and on and on, and eventually they get their rewards. If Sadio Mane doesn’t get you — here scoring his 100th goal — then Mo Salah will.

If they’re scoring two or three most games, then you’re really going to have to take all your chances against them to get anything out of the match.

Crystal Palace just couldn’t do that, and they’re not alone in that failing. Most sides can’t. However, this risky play makes Liverpool’s wins feel not routine, the way many top sides’ victories against inferior opposition often do, but more dynamic and thrilling.

The Liverpool machine is clicking again and, when they do, they are an awesome sight. More exciting than Manchester City’s cerebral approach, more unpredictable than Chelsea, they are absolutely box office entertainment.

Manchester City monotony

There’s something not quite right at Manchester City. Three league wins in four years must mean that for Pep Guardiola, the players, and the fans, the league does not thrill the way it once did.

They’ve won games by scoring a lot of goals this season but, in a way, that just hardens the complacency.

They will protest otherwise, but they will be lying to themselves. There’s no way you want a fifth title in six years as much as you wanted the first. The sheen has worn off.

However, the fanbase don’t like competitions run by Uefa, such as the Champions League, so they suffered a much-reduced crowd against RB Leipzig, to Guardiola’s unrepentant chagrin. It is the only cup their manager really wants to win to prove he’s not a bottler when it comes to the final stages.

When you’ve got a manager who wants to win a cup the fans are not passionate about, that creates a psychic rift in the camp.

After this tedious game, Guardiola sounded bored and so must the fans have been.

It’s tough being the richest and the best, you soon tire of prime steak if you eat it at every meal.

Burnley bore against Arsenal

Burnley and Sean Dyche have made their reputation of being a big physical 4-4-2 side who will get it forward quickly and give soft southerners and frail foreigners a hard time. Arsenal should’ve been the perfect opponents. Kick them a bit, get in their face and they’ll collapse and go home to nanny.

Burnley manager Sean Dyche

Instead Burnley were tame and lacklustre, especially in the first half. Even the crowd, normally boisterous, seemed subdued, bored even.

Given he’s just signed another four-year contract, maybe the thought of Dyche barking for another 48 months is depressingly predictable.

Everyone appreciates the job Dyche has done, but there’s nothing more for Burnley to achieve other than survival. That might not be enough to sustain interest after half a dozen seasons.

Dyche makes little effort in the cups — they’ve never been past the fifth round in either cup under Dyche — so just playing to finish 17th or above is all they’ve got. Fans need something more than that to stir their blood.

Burnley are a good example of the sort of zombie club the Premier League is good at creating; they hoover up ever more money but become more bloodless as they do so. This is how money kills football.

Old-school fun at St James’ Park

Leeds’ visit was an old-school knock ’em down, drag ’em out game of football, with two sides absolutely 100% committed to battering the other for 90 minutes. Not calculated. Not turned into some sort of science, or a tactical masterclass, it is so refreshing to see football played for entertainment value.

As Allan Saint-Maximin takes off toward goal, from whatever angle, it is so thrilling, so direct and fast. You can keep all of your fancy tactics and systems; someone running at speed with the ball towards the goal is still one of football’s greatest and most effective things.

Newcastle will surely not be able to keep him beyond this season. Bigger, richer clubs await his signature.

It seems very unfair that Newcastle fans have taken against their manager when he oversees a side that can play such thrilling football.

Steve Bruce is criticised for over-cautious play, but their performance on Friday was anything but cautious.

Indeed, it proved that Newcastle had a cogent and penetrating side, and perhaps the more apt critique is that he hasn’t given them licence to play with this kind of freedom every week. Both sides lack a killer striker. Both should’ve scored more but, in the circumstances, a draw was about right.

Bailey for treasured moments

The signing of Leon Bailey from Bayer Leverkusen was widely applauded as an excellent, progressive one this summer, and his debut appearance at home for Aston Villa showed us why.

Aston Villa's Leon Bailey

First his dangerous corner was headed in by a defender, and then he scored Villa’s third, tearing through a static Everton defence at pace and unleashing a devastating power drive. Then he tweaked a quad and had to come off.

He was only on for 21 minutes, but it was a glimpse of what the future holds in what is increasingly looking like a very competitive Villa team. Once they got going, they absolutely routed the Toffees.

Everton are without Dominic Calvert-Lewin for at least a few weeks and it seems to have seriously disrupted the whole side. They were disjointed and dishevelled on Saturday. The notes Rafa Benitez was writing as the home side dissected and disposed of his team looked more like an essay by the end of the day. He’s an experienced coach and will work out a way to play without his big striker available, but he clearly had not done it on Saturday afternoon.

The art of Pottering

Are Brighton the new Leicester City? They overcame the Foxes with a good 2-1 win, and at one point on Sunday afternoon were second in the table. Here’s a club with similar levels of funding, with a progressive coach looking to play an attractive, passing game, infiltrating the top four places. Sounds very Leicester-ish.

Lack of depth in the squad means they will fall away later in the season but, make no mistake, this is Graham Potter’s team. It is his intelligence that has driven them to fundamentally outperform the expectations.

Potter is the anti-Dyche. A physical 4-4-2 is anathema to him, as is telling players to stop listening to voices from outside the club — something Dyche disgracefully did to Patrick Bamford.

Potter is very much the future and, while his mates complain that Dyche doesn’t get mentioned in relation to big jobs, Potter will — precisely because he is the anti-Dyche.

Graham is working with limited resources, but using them brilliantly. These months are effectively his audition for the job at Arsenal, Spurs, or even Manchester United. If he can keep Brighton in the top half all season, we will be witnessing the emergence of a great new managerial talent.

The Canaries can’t compete 

Norwich v Watford was huge for both sides, but perhaps especially for Norwich who have to at least make a passable impersonation of a side who is trying to stay up. They failed to do that.

They’ve now lost their last 15 top-flight games and frankly it does not look impossible that they will earn zero points this campaign. It’s often said there is not much difference between the top third of the Championship and bottom third of the Premier League and while that may be generally true, the Canaries, last year’s champions, are doing their best to disprove the notion.

Toothless in attack and incontinent in defence, they’ve now scored just twice and let in 14 in five games. Watford, 3-1 winners, were hardly stellar themselves, but looked a cut above. They will do well to hold on to Ismaila Sarr in January. His graceful acceleration and two-goal haul makes him really stand out in an otherwise fairly ordinary side. 

Norwich are on pace to ship over 100 goals this season. They should avoid wasting money in the January transfer window, accept that relegation is inevitable and go down laughing.

Brentford best blunts Black Country boys

Bees boss, Thomas Franks, is an interesting manager. He comes across as very self-assured and confident in the philosophy he has brought to Brentford and that clearly invests huge confidence in his players. They’re well-prepared and play to plan.

Brentford manager Thomas Frank with Bryan Mbeumo

Against Wolves they dominated the first half, went two up and had the ball in the net four times. Wolves had no answer. 11 shots off target but none on target, despite dominating possession 63/37. They’re OK until the last third and then at that point, they don’t seem to have a plan, a strategy, or any clue what to do.

The problem with having a speed merchant like Adama Traroe is that when things get tight, the rest of the team tends to just rely on him doing something extraordinary, but Traore is not a reliable magician. His head down no-nonsense tendencies still all too frequently lack end product. He’s a fantastic out ball when you’re defending a lead, but when you’re trying to get back into a game, his effectiveness is diminished.

But Brentford’s ‘game management’, which we used to call time wasting before football got pretentious, was appalling and they should be called out on it. Even so, at the moment, they look very comfortable at this level.

VAR? Nah.

VAR continued its ridiculous pathway through Premier League football like a drunk elephant veering from wrong decision to wrong decision all weekend long. At West Ham United, it called a penalty right, but failed to give Cristiano Ronaldo two deserved penalties and wasted a lot of everyone’s time.

It is obviously a failed system. The calls it gets right would’ve been called correctly by the referee 98 times out of 100; the calls it doesn’t make are absolutely legion.

Its very existence causes the referee to pay less attention and wait for the all-seeing eye to make the decision. They miss so many incidents in so many games and make bad calls all the time, so much so it devalues the whole process. It beggars belief how they can’t see some penalties. The ones against Ronaldo were not even 50/50.

Football is a resilient sport and this particular game was still fantastic, but VAR is a really bad thing, almost as bad as David Moyes’ decision to put Mark Noble on cold to take a last-kick penalty. Didn’t you watch the Euro final, David?

RIP Jimmy Greaves

Spurs’ game against Chelsea was somewhat overshadowed by the death of Jimmy Greaves. That he should depart on the day his two old clubs were playing each other was typically perfect timing. On Saint and Greavsie, he changed how football was presented, injecting more fun and humour and developing a far more relaxed presentation style.

Their approach eventually became the default style for all football shows. The programme only ran for seven years from the mid-1980s until the Premier League started, turning up at the party, drunk and throwing its weight and money around. However, those seven years were, though we didn’t know it at the time, the future. Ian St John played the straight man, always on the verge of cracking up at his partner’s jokes, and Greavsie, grinning like a football Bagpuss, always slightly mischievous.

As a footballer, he was second to none. It is not said often enough that in many ways he was a modern player, liquid and dynamic — and far better than any Spurs have now.

He was fast over 20 yards but he was more than that; he was a stone-cold finisher who just never seemed to miss a chance.

That’s how he ended up with 398 goals in 550 games for those two clubs. This at a time when the defending was brutal and removing someone’s knee cap with one kick only warranted a yellow card. Thanks for all the fun, Jimmy.