Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s Premier League football. This was the weekend when Erling Haaland merely scored twice as Manchester City survived an early scare against Brentford , when Marcus Rashford broke his goal drought , when Everton found another way to cause their supporters despair by losing a two-goal lead for the second game running, and when Harvey Barnes produced a blinding strike to earn Newcastle United a win over Wolverhampton Wanderers . Here we will ask if Ange Postecoglou’s dogmatism provides more negatives than positives, whether Liverpool ’s defeat to Nottingham Forest was a blip or the sign of something more worrying, and whether we can interest you in some EFL chaos.
Should Ange Postecoglou be more like Mikel Arteta? The good news for Tottenham Hotspur is they are top of one table in this nascent season. The bad news is it’s only the possession table, one they sit astride with a very impressive 67.8 per cent of the ball over their four games.
The really bad news might be that third in that table are Southampton , which perhaps indicates that it’s not a ranking that is necessarily good to be top of. Advertisement Spurs are also top of another, slightly more subjective table, that of the most frustrating team to watch in the Premier League. They were once again infuriating in the 1-0 defeat to Arsenal, having the vast majority of .