Premier League 2022-23 review: matches of the season

The darkest hour is before the dawn, they say, and Erik ten Hag’s United regime began with two grim league defeats. After Brighton had won at Old Trafford, brilliant Brentford made hay in boiling temperatures as the new United, in attempting to play the ball out from the back, looked rather like the failing collective of the previous decade. David de Gea dropped clangers, Cristiano Ronaldo snarled at his teammates. “[Ten Hag] will need to be an exceptional manager, a man of considerable moral courage, to recover from this,” I wrote in my match report that day. He has gone a considerable distance to suggest he might be. Brentford, meanwhile, confirmed they were here to stay as a fly in any passing elite-level ointment.

Using this season’s Tottenham side as a gauge for anything is a dangerous pursuit but after an early-season draw with Manchester City, Eddie Howe’s team arrived in London to begin the upward curve that eventually qualified them for the Champions League. This was a statement win. Bruno Guimarães and Joelinton dominated midfield and Callum Wilson scored an opportunist’s strike before Miguel Almirón, in the form of his life, lashed in after cutting in from the right. Harry Kane – who else? – pulled one back for Spurs but Newcastle later locked the game down. It was a textbook example of the solid style that has lately moved Alan Shearer to pen the purplest of prose in gushing tribute to Howe.

About that Manchester United revival. Ten Hag’s improvement of the team has not made them immune to sudden collapses. When it goes badly, it can really go. Manchester City beat them 6-3, Sevilla pummelled them in the second leg of a Europa League quarter-final – but this was a historic destruction from an eternal rival.