Leicester City 5 – 3 Manchester United
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Manchester United, one of the greatest and the richest football clubs in the world, aren’t supposed to lose to little clubs like Leicester City. Heck, just one Manchester United player, Angel Di Maria, perhaps costs thrice as much as the entire Leicester City team. Manchester United have Wayne Rooney, Robin Van Persie, Juan Mata, Di Maria, Falcao and Herrera, are coached by the celebrated manager Louis Van Gaal. Leicester have Jamie Vardy, Leandro Ulloa, David Nugent and managed by an unknown manager, Nigel Pearson. Still, Leicester beat Manchester United. Not just beat them, but destroyed them, scoring 5 goals, 4 of them in super quick time. Watching Leicester City players slice through Manchester United defense was like a knife through butter – such a thing would have been unthinkable and even impossible during Sir Alex Ferguson’s reign. But this is the new Manchester United, and it’s not necessarily a good thing. While there were many heroes for Leicester, Jamie Vardy was the star of the show, controlling the game from the middle of the park, driving his team forward and scoring a goal himself. Perhaps the greatest win in Leicester City’s history.
Tottenham Hotspur 0 – 1 West Brom
The reason for English Premier League being the most exciting football league in the world is that, nothing can be taken for granted. Often, making predictions in the EPL is a hazardous business. No football expert worth his salt would have predicted that West Bromwich Albion, a side that was seemingly dead and buried after a string of poor results, would beat Mauricio Pochettino’s Tottenham Hotspur at home. But that’s precisely what happened. The match saw West Brom snatch a goal in the 74th minute through James Morrison after having being relentlessly attacked with no end product by Tottenham. The result was a shock because Tottenham do not normally lose to lower ranking sides at home.
As manager Mauricio Pochettino exclaimed when asked about the lack of passion shown by his players, “This is my surprise. We need to show more. West Brom arrived with only two points but we need to show respect. We were wrong. I’m angry, disappointed. We had a bad day. The team looked very nervous. The way we played was wrong because we played very slow from the beginning.”
Everton 2 – 3 Crystal Palace
Roberto Martinez has been widely regarded as one of the best young managers in the English Premier League. He did his reputation no harm by taking Everton to the 5th place in last season’s league tables. However, this season, things seem to be falling apart slightly for Martinez. Everton have not won even once at home, at Goodison Park, which is usually a fortress. They lost to a rampaging Chelsea earlier, but that could be considered acceptable. What’s not acceptable is losing to the lowly Crystal Palace. The high flying Everton, which now plays in Europe, isn’t supposed to lose to sides like Crystal Palace, and that too at home. The loss can be attributed to a couple of poor decisions by Tim Howard, who is otherwise very reliable, which led to the opening two goals. Crystal Palace never looked back after that and pressed home the advantage with the match clinching third goal. Roberto Martinez would be wondering where it has all gone wrong for his team.
But Martinez tried to downplay the result, blaming the loss on luck: “It is an incredible situation when you look at how solid we were against West Bromwich Albion last weekend and Wolfsburg.There is something spooky about the statistics. Three shots on target, three individual errors, three goals. It was a strange game. We were fantastic for the first 20 minutes and looked like we had seven days to prepare, not just a few.”
Manchester City 1 – 1 Chelsea
Before this match, Manchester City player Frank Lampard had scored against 38 teams in the English Premier League. And now, he has scored against 39 teams. The 39th team Lampard has scored against to devastating effect, is none other than Chelsea. Lampard has played for Chelsea for an amazing 13 years, scored 220 goals for them, and is a Chelsea legend. It was ironical to see him get his 221st goal against none other than his old team, the team he is identified with, and clearly, a team to which he is still emotionally attached to – if one goes by the fact that Lampard refused to celebrate his incredibly important goal, which levelled the scores for 10-man Manchester City against Chelsea, effectively keeping them in the hunt for the English Premier League title.
What was also clear was the deep animosity between the two coaches, Manuel Pellegrini and Jose Mourinho. Mourinho quite comically insists on calling the Manchester City manager “Mr.Pellegrino”.
Pellegrini wasn’t one to take this lightly, and attacked Chelsea for their tactics. “It was very similar to the Stoke team, with a big team playing against a small team with very good players, trying to defend, trying to keep the score [nil-nil]. They had nine players in front of their box. I said last week that it will be very difficult for us to defend the title because every team will play the way Chelsea did. I repeat that I think they had no intention to win the game. They came just to draw and they scored on the counterattack against 10 players.”
