Premier League weekly: Spotlight on Manchester as Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho vie for the title

IT has been another eventful week in the Premier League.

Arsenal were accused of lacking ‘cojones’ in their defeat at Watford, Leicester manager Craig Shakespeare was shown the door after just eight games and our Champions League representatives all top their groups at the halfway stage.

But at the centre of PREMIER LEAGUE WEEKLY is a focus on Manchester and the contrasting approaches of Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho to winning the title.

Two different approaches, but is there a right and wrong way to win the title?

IN the last two Premier League Saturdays, I have seen one four-goal victory and one by a margin of five. While one of these was a straightforward, if boring affair, the other left me dazzled, with fellow journalists in the press box recognising that they had seen some special football. In case anyone was wondering, the two matches were Manchester United 4 Crystal Palace 0 and Manchester City 7 Stoke 2.

After eight games, neither United nor City has been beaten. They have scored a combined 50 goals and conceded just six between them. Unless Tottenham can go on a very special run, the title is likely to be a straight fight between the red and blue of Manchester. But it is not just the fact that rival clubs from the same city are going head-to-head, but rival philosophies.

Jose Mourinho is the ultimate winner because he has proved that time and again wherever he has been. He has to be respected for all his achievements, but can he be loved? All his teams have scored lots of goals and had plenty of big victories, but when you think of a Jose Mourinho team, it is the Manchester United who turned up at Anfield last Saturday, determined to not lose above all and to defend their goal. United did that perfectly but the end result was a 0-0 draw that satisfied few in terms of enjoyment.

United have already won four matches 4-0 in the Premier League, yet the overriding statistic is that they have kept seven clean sheets from eight games and you would imagine they would shut out Huddersfield tomorrow to make it eight out of nine. Now there is an art to good defending and too often in recent seasons, many teams in the Premier League have defended very poorly. Mourinho has used the old template of building from the back to create a winning team – establishing that solid base, being hard to beat and then addressing the attack and adding the gloss later. It is working at the moment, but will it be enough for United’s first league title for five years?

Pep Guardiola’s method of football is based on the principles first demonstrated by Ajax and the Netherlands in the 1970s. It’s the concept of every player being comfortable on the ball and where the team dominates possession. By dominating the ball, you control both attack and defence and suddenly in the last month, Manchester City have started to produce some of the football Pep was known for in his time at Barcelona and Bayern Munich. There have been four, five, six and seven goals in matches. So many of them have been tap-ins after simple, but brilliant football has carved out unmissable chances. Now it would be wrong not to point out that Pep has been given vast sums of money to buy the very-best players, but there has been a real pleasure in watching City play so far, and surely football is supposed to provide that sort of entertainment.

You would have to go back to 1894/95 to find a team who has scored than City’s 29 from their opening eight top-flight matches in England, so Kevin De Bruyne and Co. are threatening the record books. But the question is whether City can keep up this free-scoring method during the cold winter months when football in this country can become a real slog. Performing away at Swansea and Newcastle on cold Wednesday nights in December may require more than tiki-taka football. Is that when the ability to grind out 1-0 wins will come in handy? Because the history of football will tell us that Championships have never been won without those type of results. And as they love to say in American Football, ‘Offense wins games; defence wins Championships’.

Stats of the Day:

93.25 – The average number of league goals scored per season by Pep Guardiola’s teams.

28.23 – The average number of league goals conceded per season by Jose Mourinho’s teams.

Player of the Day:

WILFRIED ZAHA’s importance to Crystal Palace has grown by the week during their wretched start to the season. And that is despite not kicking a ball between August 12 and October 14. We all suspected that Zaha was Palace’s X-Factor player already but watching the Eagles in the short-lived reign of Frank De Boer and the first three games under Roy Hodgson, that became ever more apparent.

Zaha played in the whole of the 3-0 home defeat to Huddersfield on the opening day, but succumbed to a knee injury after some heavy treatment from the visiting defenders. With him on the sidelines, not only did Palace not win but they rarely looked like scoring. When the winger returned last Saturday, he sparked the Selhurst Park crowd and his team-mates into life. Suddenly there was a new energy and intent breathed into Palace’s play and thanks to Zaha’s winner, they claimed a memorable three points over Champions Chelsea – their first points and goals of the season.

Hodgson said this week that Zaha cannot keep them up on his own, but the former England manager will know that the 24-year-old is his trump card. If Zaha can follow up what he did against Chelsea in the trip to Newcastle, he will single-handedly deliver belief to the dressing room and the stands that Palace can climb away from the bottom of the table.

Adam’s Friday/Saturday Scores:

West Ham 1 Brighton 0

Chelsea 2 Watford 2

Huddersfield 0 Manchester United 3

Manchester City 3 Burnley 1

Newcastle 1 Crystal Palace 0

Stoke 2 Bournemouth 1

Swansea 1 Leicester 2

Southampton 2 West Brom 0