The current crop of Dembele’s in football right now are pretty good, wouldn’t you agree? There’s Celtic’s Moussa scoring for fun (albeit in Scotland), and there’s also Barcelona’s 135.5m signing Ousmane. But none are better than Mousa Dembele, the bloke who needs a wrecking ball to knock off the ball. He’s consistently in good form. So he must wonder what else he must do to earn a starting place in his national team ahead of the Belgian Jordan Henderson , Axel Witsel.
In the North London derby, his class was shown in abundance up against the hapless Arsenal midfield. He put on the style and consequently crushed any hopes of Arsenal getting anything from the match. The ‘Hurrikane’ headed home the deciding goal to hand Spurs the bragging rights in front of a crowd of 83, 222, setting a new Premier League record crowd. And the assist came courtesy of a pin point cross from Ben Davies, finding Kane in between two Arsenal defenders. I can’t help but feel had Danny Rose or Kieran Trippier supplied the goal, then the pundits would have been waxing lyrical. It was downplayed on Match of the Day, though it was not anything I didn’t expect.
The cast of Geordie Shore were not the only one’s in Newcastle out enjoying themselves last weekend. At St James’s Park (Or is it now the Sports Direct stadium?), Newcastle fans enjoyed seeing their side beat Manchester United thanks to Gordon Ramsay’s goal (Matt Ritchie) in a game they thoroughly deserved to win. Rafa Benitez’s men took the Reds by surprise with a fast start and probably ruffled their feathers a little bit, and in the process made Jonjo Shelvey look like Xabi Alonso for the rest of the game.
Commenced in midweek, was the Champions League. And Spurs never let the Arsenal victory get to their heads with an assured performance in Turin, when Harry Kane and Christian Eriksen earned a 2-2 draw against Juventus. Though to be fair, he had to do it against 10 men.
Anyone who have watched Arsenal this season knows that Granit Xhaka is about as useful as the ‘a’ in okay. Adds nothing but is only there to make up the numbers. They had the chance to recuperate their pride with a trip to Ostersund in Sweden, and they did so with a comfortable 3-0 win.
Not even the igloo changing rooms was enough to intimate them, although it was probably not designed for anything but to look ‘cool’. See what I did there?
Argentine goal machine Sergio Aguero scored four goals on Saturday to help Manchester City annihilate Leicester City 5-1, which meant he had scored 14 goals in his last 7 games. And he was also on target in Switzerland, when City picked up an easy 4-0 win over the perennial Champions League walkovers FC Basel. It was also a match which also saw the resurrection of Leroy Sane. Fresh from the grave following the damage to his ankle ligament in the FA Cup 2 weeks ago, he came on as a second half sub to make the most miraculous recovery since Lazarus.
Unpredictable Liverpool cruised past feeder club Southampton 2-0 before smashing former UCL winners Porto 5-0, setting up a nervy 2nd leg at Anfield. Signing of the season Mo Salah and Roberto Firmino shared the other couple of goals. Not bad for a side playing without a recognised striker, or so they say.
And that’s your lot for this week. Have a good weekend.