One match into a 38-game season is of course much too early to offer a clearcut sense of where the title might be heading, but the opening weekend of the Premier League season did nothing to disabuse anyone of the notion that it promises to be the same three way tussle for supremacy that it was 12 months ago. Before a ball was kicked, Liverpool and Arsenal looked the only teams capable of wrestling the title off Manchester City. After 1361 such kicks on Saturday afternoon, they got their job done, setting the standard with 2-0 wins over Ipswich and Wolves that Manchester City repeated against Chelsea.
It might be much too soon to draw hard and fast conclusions about the destiny of the title, but it has never been premature to ask questions. With that in mind, here's what the trio of 2-0 wins have got us pondering. Man City: What are Guardiola and De Bruyne cooking? After two and a half seasons of relatively minimal tweaking, both in terms of starting personnel and system, Pep Guardiola seems intent on doing Premier League title No.
7 on hard mode, or as hard as it gets when you have a nation state backing you up. A squad that has generally been designed to dice with injury crises already looked down to the bare bones on Sunday with Rodri absent and Julian Alvarez gone, the young Argentine the sort of tactically adept hybrid forward who is hard to find even with Manchester City's wealth. Mateo Kovacic filled in admirably for the former and a replacement for the latter may yet b.