Manchester City continue to impress. While their 5-0 demolition of Crystal Palace at the Etihad wasn’t unexpected, it did mean that they took their goal difference to +19, a rate matched only once at this stage in the last 10 seasons (Chelsea 2010/11). Their 21 goals scored is only matched by that same Chelsea team and exceeded by the 2011/12 iteration of Manchester United (22), while no team has conceded fewer than two goals at this stage since Portsmouth conceded just one back in 2006/07. So far they are doing a mighty fine impersonation of a dominant team in the league.
That’s not to undersell their rivals who continue to win, but this week it was in a less dominant fashion. Manchester United’s 1-0 victory at Southampton was more laborious than previous wins - they took just nine shots, while Chelsea managed to carve out a 4-0 victory at Stoke despite taking just seven shots in the whole game.
Alvaro Morata’s contribution to the league so far has been impressive. Better to end up on the right side of variance when creating so few chances, though, and game plans were certainly aided by first-half leads for both Chelsea and United. In the long-term each will need to create more, especially away from home. Perhaps Champions League considerations loomed large and there was a temptation to stick rather than twist.
Huddersfield’s early forays in the division have been solid enough. Winning their first two games kept them firmly out of any negative coverage early on and having backed up those results with three draws and just one defeat, their nine points looks fairly healthy. They are using a familiar method too. During their promotion season in the Championship, no team was involved in games with fewer shots, and currently they are following that trend in the Premier League with another league-low of around 22 shots combined per game.
Last season, part of the function of being involved in low-event games was that they were also involved in a high volume of close games, which produced startling results. Of the 34 games in which no more than a goal separated the two teams, their record was a superb 22-6-6. This looks fine on the surface but instinctively you might imagine that such a skew could be hard to sustain - and you’d probably be right. There is enough randomness in football that a huge positive bias in close matches is unlikely to recur. Indeed, the flip side to this was the opposite; in matches separated by more than one goal, Town lost nine of 12.
The perfect test of this theory would have been another season in the Championship, which given their -2 goal difference in 2016/17 could reasonably have been expected. However, here they are in the Premier League and while they have started competitively, a small warning flag can be raised after Saturday's match at Burnley, which featured the fewest shots of any game in the league so far this season (14).
Huddersfield don’t allow many chances but nor do they create many themselves, which again may well tend towards close games. However, we have a recent blueprint here: last season’s Middlesbrough team. They too prioritised defensive solidity, but as the season wore on their inability to create goals themselves severely impacted their ability to collect points at a sufficient rate to stay up. That a team with such a reliable defence should go down was without recent precedent, but too many draws meant too few wins and this is a trap Huddersfield would do well to avoid.
The schedule has also been kind to Huddersfield, and that is about to change. They haven’t faced any of last season’s top six yet, but of their next eight fixtures five of them are against the league’s giants. Tottenham, Manchester City and Manchester United all visit the Kirklees Stadium, while trips to Anfield and Stamford Bridge will be a significant test.
Middlesbrough’s eventual predicament was concealed by the fact they remained outside the relegation zone until March, but once they landed there they never recovered. Huddersfield may not face a similar trajectory, but their eventual fate could be decided by whether they persist with their strategy of trying to edge close games with few chances, or throw caution to the wind and try and outplay teams that are also in the bottom-half mix. At the business end of the season, it may be worth taking risks.
For now they have a decent start to build upon and a small cushion. But it will get tougher.
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