While Chelsea may see more performances like Sunderland's
Monday 1 December 2014 15:21, UK
Chris Kamara has his say on the weekend's Premier League action, including important wins for Manchester United and Tottenham, and some controversial decisions on Super Sunday.
Tottenham showed their grit against Everton, and in the space of a few results they’ve turned a crisis into a promising season.
It’s not easy for a new manager to hit the ground running. They need to bring in their thoughts, their tactics, their philosophy, the way they play and the way they see the players playing, so it will take time. It’s slow but sure. At the time, you lose one or two results early on and all of a sudden people panic, but you get a couple of good results and people suddenly look at it in a different way.
Stability-wise it’s better. Manchester United also look more confident. The defence isn’t as bad as everybody thought it was – it’s just that earlier on they were conceding daft, sloppy goals. Chris Smalling, who came in for a hell of a lot of stick, was superb and not just for getting a goal.
Robin van Persie got back on the scoresheet and Wayne Rooney scored again – he’s playing out of his skin. They’re playing with real confidence and, like with Mauricio Pochettino, Van Gaal has got his feet under the table and he’s got the ball rolling.
I’ve watched the highlights, and it was a definite penalty for Sergio Aguero. How could it not be? And a yellow card is insult to injury because you can’t rescind that.
We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again – the only thing we keep saying is that you’ve got to be 100 per cent sure the player has dived. That one is a nailed-on penalty yet he ends up getting a yellow card for simulation. On the whole, though, you’d probably have to say the referees had a good weekend.
In the Spurs game, Federico Fazio had his arm in the air, but as we’ve seen from the start of this season it’s very hard to get a penalty for handball these days. We’ve campaigned on Goals on Sunday for the last five years that the law should be changed, because deliberate handball is very rare.
It’s got to be at the referee’s discretion because 90 per cent or more of handballs are not deliberate. If that was given yesterday you couldn’t argue with that as a Spurs or Everton fan because of the position of his arm. All in all, what’s happened is that Tottenham have got away with it.
It’s too early to be talking about Chelsea as champions because there’s a long, long way to go. There are busy periods, and they’re still involved in every single competition so they’re going to get injuries and they will get a loss of form.
It’s going to be difficult for Chelsea to make sure their players keep playing at a top level. They had a hard game in Schalke, albeit playing the best football they’ve played all season, but then they didn’t get back to London until five in the morning and then they had to travel all the way to the north-east.
Take nothing away from Sunderland, though. Defensively they were as good as you could be in the circumstances. Other teams are going to see what they did and they’re going to set themselves up against Chelsea in that way – they do it at Stamford Bridge anyway and they’re going to start doing it at home, so Chelsea have got to expect this on a regular basis.
Obviously it’s an important win for QPR because you’ve got to win your home games, but in terms of excitement and two teams just wanting to attack and have a real go, you couldn’t have got any better for a neutral on Saturday.
Both managers will have been pleased – obviously Harry the happier, but to go away from home and create as many chances as Leicester did you think on another given day you’d have taken the three points. So it’s not doom and gloom for them for sure.
It isn’t one of those games that’s going to determine what happens at the end of the season, it’s one of those games where I know – if I’m Nigel Pearson – if my players play like that away from home they you’ll win games.
It’s still too early to be talking about relegation because it’s so tight at the bottom. There are three points between looking safe and being at the bottom, so it’s still relatively very early. Nobody’s dead and buried. I’d be surprised if the team that’s bottom on Christmas Day went down, as used to be the norm, because of how tight it is.
I’m so pleased for Sam Allardyce because at least the critics have got off his back. At the start of the season the favourites for the sack were Sam and Alan Pardew – they’re two very good managers who will probably look back at that game and say they didn’t play as well as they should have done.
From Sam’s point of view, I know he’s already looking at players in January to make sure they can maintain their position. He’s not sitting back. Andy Carroll’s coming back in, even though the players who were in there before were performing really well. Kevin Nolan’s no longer the first name on the team sheet – he has to work hard to get his place in the team, so the competition for places is hotting up.
Who knows what they can achieve? It’s such an unpredictable league where there are so many good teams. All Sam and the supporters will be hoping is that they can maintain their good form between now and the end of the season.
