Liverpool, Chelsea, and Manchester United were all involved in extremely chaotic games this weekend, full of fun goals and terrible defending. It’s probably just start of the season stuff, but it sure would be cool if this was just the direction the league was going in.

I did not particularly enjoy Enzo Maresca’s highly disciplined positional play at Chelsea, and I thought his tactics would stifle City’s best players. We’re only two competitive matches into his tenure, but we’ve already seen enough for me to conclude that I was probably wrong, or that City’s top attackers are so good that it doesn’t matter.

A new-look Crystal Palace back 3 had absolutely no answers for Erling Haaland and Rayan Cherki, who were exceptional in this game. City were well on top from the start, and never looked like giving up the result after Haaland’s opening header. Cherki’s goals were both outrageous bits of skill.

City have comfortably been the better side, with over 2 xG for and under 1 xG against, in both of their first two matches. It’s going very well.

Andoni Iraola’s start at Liverpool has been much less convincing, though his side has fought back for a point in both games. There were some big positives in this one for the Reds — Alexander Isak scored! Florian Wirtz set up both goals! Victor Muñoz looks very promising! — but there will likely be more concern than optimism coming out of this one.

Ryan Gravenberch was swapped out for Alexis MacAllister in midfield, but Liverpool had the same problems with slowing down fast counter-attacks. MacAllister looked very much like someone who’d spent his whole summer running himself into the ground for Lionel Messi and was not yet back to his best, losing 50-50 duels ahead of a few of Forest’s shots, including Dan Ndoye’s opener.

Jérémy Jacquet showed off his immense talent with his passing and defensive contributions on many occasions, but also got caught napping on the quick throw by Liam Delap to Neco Williams, when Forest won the penalty for their second goal.

Alisson looks old. Virgil Van Dijk looks old. Both fullbacks look poor defensively. Liverpool have a myriad of problems, and it’s going to be really interesting to see how Iraola approaches fixing them.

Forest, meanwhile, look like they have the pieces to be a solid counter-attacking team and well clear of the relegation race under Oliver Glasner.

If you didn’t catch this game, you might have seen the teams involved and the score and guessed it was a relatively low event, defensive battle. But this was an extremely entertaining and open game, a bit of Peak Barclays. It’s probably not a great sign for Everton that they got sucked into an athletics meet, but they held their own.

Please enjoy funny graph, in which the team holding the lead fails to score from over 1 xG in a 15 minute spell near the end, and the one chasing the equalizer does very little until they score from a set piece.

I think Everton’s midfield will look better once they’ve got James Garner and Hayden Hackney both settled in, fit, and ready to play together for 90 minutes. Harrison Armstrong showed flashes of serious ability, but also got worked for most of the game.

For Bournemouth, this is back-to-back games where they’ve played pretty well and then thrown a result away late. They’ll be fine if they keep playing the same way and don’t let it cook their mentality.

I’m convinced Hull are a team of destiny, one of the select few for which xG is fake and dumb and does not matter. This publication and every other analytics nerd will be correct about them being one of the worst Premier League teams ever. They’ll have something like a -45 xGD by the time it’s all said and done. And they might find a way to stay up anyway, because football is dumb.

Coventry look bad, by the way. Real stinky. Frank Lampard is a solid two big hops ahead of the field in the sack race.

I’m going to post the biggest piece of cope ever. Ready?

Tottenham weren’t that bad.

But no one wants to hear it from those losing losers anymore, I get it.

Spurs are about to have an extremely dramatic 48 hours, with several more ins and outs on the transfer market. When it’s all said and done, we’ll be looking at a new team with something like £400m spent on it in a single window. I don’t know how good or bad this team will be in a month. Neither do you. Neither does Roberto De Zerbi. We’re all just along for the ride.

On the other side, the early season revivals of Yoane Wissa and Anthony Elanga, who disappointed last season, has been cool to see. Newcastle might be able to stabilize mostly through internal improvement.

Supporting a Xabi Alonso-coached team might give me a heart attack, but as a neutral, I’m absolutely loving his presence in the league. This was one of the least controlled, most chaotic performances you’re ever going to see from a Bigger Club against a Smaller Club, and it worked.

The passing stats from this one are shocking. Chelsea — again, the richer, favored side, playing at home — completed 161 of 249 passes (65%). Brighton completed 599 of 706 passes. But Chelsea had 2.84 xG to Brighton’s 1.17. Who needs to control the ball when you can just go get shots?

Now, would you prefer your team be able to put their foot on the ball and control a match after going up 3-0? Yes, that would probably be better for Chelsea than what transpired over the final 60 minutes of the match, when Brighton threatened to make a comeback. But I would have been less entertained, so who’s to say whether Chelsea’s tactics were bad or not?

Sadly, this game also featured Moisés Caicedo going off injured less than 15 minutes after he was subbed into the game. He’s going to be a massive loss for the Blues going forward if he’s out for any extended period of time.

Brentford will have come away from this one extremely frustrated to not get all three points. They scored the opener through Kevin Schade in the first half, and prevented Leeds from creating anything until roughly the hour mark. And while Leeds were improved from then, they were still light on truly big chances until Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s equalizer in the 79th minute.

Leeds’ substitutions made the difference in this one. Daniel James and Lucas Nmecha changed the game after they came on in the 68th minute, and made their cases for starting more going forward.

Very little happened in this match until Wilson Isidor hit the post with a big chance in the 70th minute. He rectified that mistake with a goal 5 minutes later, and that was that. I do not think that either of these teams are very good.

This was a nothing performance from Fulham, with a pretty fake news 11 shots and 0.74 xG, as most of it came from the final 5 minutes as Sunderland protected their lead.

When Leif Davis scored the opener for the Tractor Boys in the 29th minute, I was cracking jokes about Michael Carrick getting sacked by Halloween. Then the rest of the game happened.

I don’t actually think we’ve learned anything about United from two games against newly promoted sides and relegation favorites, but Bruno Fernandes turned in one of the best performances of his career to dig United out of a hole and produce an emphatic win. Next week United go away to Everton, and we might actually get some useful information about how good they are.

Speaking of teams we’re not getting any good information about this week, Aston Villa are heavy favorites to lose this one, and it probably doesn’t mean anything for their future. Like Spurs, they’re about to make several more transfers in the next 2 days, and no one knows what the side will look like in a month.

But I’m feeling Nick Jackson as an Ollie Watkins replacement at a £10m profit. Nice piece of business, this.

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