Manchester United’s win at West Ham and their continued drive towards the title gives them a realistic claim to this award. Aston Villa’s seventh consecutive away win 2-0 at Blackburn means that they could justifiably be the ‘Hot team’.
Despite both of the strong claims above I am going to give the award this week to David Moyes’ Everton team. What a great week they have had!
Their 3-0 win over Bolton on Saturday following on from their extra time FA Cup win over Liverpool means that they are worthy winners.
I’m going to be a little unfair here. The bottom five teams all lost so logically, one of those sides must be the ‘Not Hot team’. I’m not going to hand that award out to one of the strugglers and add to their misery.
The fans of one team were singing, ‘you don’t know what you’re doing’ and were demanding the sacking of their manager. One of the bottom five? No, a team in fourth place, the FA Cup fifth round and the knock out stages of the Champions League.
Chelsea are having a bit of a nightmare. Their 0-0 draw with Hull was fairly abject and some more clinical finishing by the visitors would have made things even worse. As a Watford fan, I can’t wait to play them in the FA Cup next week!!
Another clean sheet for Edwin van der Sar in his remarkable run of clean sheets, but the award this week has to go to Manchester City keeper Shay Given. Week after week, year after year, Given has produced the goods for Newcastle and he has thoroughly deserved his big money move.
In his debut for City he made two or three excellent saves and showed the City faithful just what they are going to get. A top quality performance by a top quality keeper.
He may have won the golden glove award for conceding the fewest goals over the past couple of seasons and he may be widely regarded as one of the best goalkeepers in the world, but Pepe Reine made a right pigs ear of both Portsmouth goals on Saturday!
It is rare for the Spanish keeper to make a mistake and the whole of Liverpool will be hoping that this was a one-off. The last thing Rafa needs at the moment is for his goalkeeper to lose his form.
Any one of the apparently unbeatable Manchester United back four could pick up this award this week but I’m going to look elsewhere at a man who is rapidly becoming a serious challenger to John Terry’s England place. Everton’s Phil Jagielka is on a run of form that must be surprising even him.
He can’t put a foot wrong at the moment and looks every inch an international footballer.
He has been consistently one of the Premier League’s best defenders but on Saturday evening, Portsmouth’s Silvan Distin ensured that he was removed from Sir Alex Ferguson’s Christmas card list!
He defended stoutly against Liverpool’s somewhat weakened forward line but then having seen his side take the lead, he then managed to swing at the ball and miss it altogether to allow Liverpool back into the game.
Together with Peter Crouch (see Not Hot striker) Distin got Liverpool, and particularly Rafa Benitez, after his amazing team selection, out of jail.
Ryan Giggs scored the winning goal for Manchester United at West Ham. It was his first league goal of the season and it meant that he has now scored in every one of the seventeen Premier League seasons!
That is a remarkable record and Giggs is a remarkable player. He is no longer the flying winger that he used to be but he is still a top class player. The goal was superb and let’s not forget the part played by the other old man of the team, Paul Scholes, who is Giggs’ biggest challenger for the award this week.
Earlier this season Emanuel Eboue was booed by his own Arsenal fans because of the poor quality of his performance. He seemed to have recovered from that setback pretty well and in the first few minutes of yesterday’s North London derby he looked like a decent player.
He was rightly booked for a ridiculous piece of dissent and then kicked out even more ridiculously off the ball giving the referee no choice but to send him off after about half an hour.
Quite simply, Eboue was utterly stupid and to behave in this manner in such an important game, he will have done little to endear himself to the Arsenal fans.
I didn’t give this award to Fernando Torres last week despite his two goals against Chelsea. This week he was inexplicably left on the bench by his manager at Portsmouth.
He was called upon some fifteen minutes before the end and in injury time he headed home the invaluable winner for his side.
He is not physically or match fit, but he is still a great, great striker.
I am a Peter Crouch fan. I think he is a far better player than he is often given credit for. However, at the moment he looks about as far away from being likely to score a goal as it is possible for a striker to be.
He is playing in a very poor side as Portsmouth are probably challenging Middlesbrough for the title of the Premier League’s worst at the moment, but individually, he is giving them very little.
Saturday saw him make a suicidal back-pass that lead to an indirect free-kick for Liverpool. To add insult to injury he charged down the resulting effort only to see it go through his legs and into the goal.
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