By The Telegraph (World News) | Created at 2024-09-28 10:25:29 | Updated at 2024-09-30 05:16:43
1 day ago
Welcome to our coverage for the early Premier League game between Newcastle United and Manchester City from St James’ Park. City have a chance to extend their lead over the rest of the table to four points but, really, what does that mean at this stage of the season? Very little.
Plenty of the talk in the last day or so has been about the ‘war’ that has apparently been declared between Manchester City and Arsenal, who played a thrilling and tempestuous 2-2 draw last Sunday.
There has been an awful lot of bluster from both Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta about it and the events of the game last weekend. Really, though, what exactly does ‘war’ between the two sides look like when they only play each other once more in this league campaign and that is in four months’ time? You could argue that it is pretty meaningless.
The real ‘war’ is the accumulation of the points totals in the next 33 games both sides have. And for City that starts with a trip to Eddie Howe’s Newcastle this afternoon. Newcastle come into this game off the back of their first league defeat of the season away to Fulham. That defeat. Telegraph Sport’s Luke Edwards wrote, was perhaps coming.
“They have not been playing well but have kept grinding out results. That cannot last and this time Fulham punished their mistakes,” he wrote in his match report.
“This, though, was the worst performance so far. They were terrible in the first half in particular. Blunt in attack, leaky at the back and largely non-existent in midfield.”
So, an improvement is needed then despite 10 points from their five games so far. Is this game against City a free hit? Not quite, really as it’s at home. City will obviously want to - and most likely will - bounce back from dropping points against Arsenal last time out and, whilst there was talk of the league being already a foregone conclusion a couple of weeks ago, it is one football game and every result is possible.
A big loss for City will be Rodri, who was injured in that game at the Emirates on Sunday. He has now been confirmed as out for the rest of the season. How big a loss we will find out over the next few months. I suspect that City will probably be able to absorb his loss without too much damage to their title hopes, however good he is. That said, the stats bear out that they would much rather have him than not, with a win percentage of nine points better with him in the side.
Anyway, we get under way at 12.30pm and we will have the team news for you very shortly indeed.
