Despite all their luxury attacking players it is back-to-basics defending that has been key to Manchester City’s and Chelsea’s success this season
Several epochs ago, back in the long-forgotten wilderness of October 2020, a good deal of airtime and column inches were expended on the curious deluge of high-scoring thrillers that had occurred in the first few rounds of the new Premier League season. Aston Villa put seven past Liverpool. Leicester put five past Manchester City. José Mourinho’s Tottenham, who pretty much everyone agreed were a team going places, put six past Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s Manchester United, who pretty much everyone agreed were sinking without trace.
Everywhere you looked, defences were on fire. By the end of the fourth round of fixtures, the average number of goals per game was a scarcely credible 3.79. As ever, football’s content-industrial complex kicked into gear. Various airy theories were propounded. The lack of crowds. The truncated pre-season. The new handball laws. Dodgy keepers. In a newspaper column, the former England striker Stan Collymore declared that “the art of defending is dead”, a pronouncement he had previously made in both 2016 and 2014.
