The Premier League has been blessed with some supremely talented units. The never-say-die attitude of Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, the grit and determination of early Mourinho’s Chelsea and the invincibility of mid-2000s Arsenal and Pep’s latest City technicians. Two of these were missing from the discussion of the best three Premier League teams with The Guardian’s Daniel Harris on OTB AM this morning.
The conversation was in relation to whether some Manchester United sides under Ferguson have benefited from the passage of time, and if some of the more prosaic performances have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Particularly apt, one might think, given the turgidity has punctuated a lot of the Jose Mourinho era.
“When you have these conversations about who the best English clubs were, for me it was United in 2008, United in ’98-’99 and then Chelsea. And then daylight,” believes Daniel.
Daniel has a set methodology for identifying the best teams from the 26 years the Premier League has been in existence.
“I look at three criteria: what did you win, who did you beat and what did you do in the biggest games? ‘What did you win?’ is a purely objective standard. ‘Who did you beat?’ is difficult because if you happen to be in an era where the teams are not that good, then hard luck. If you look at United in ’92-’94, they beat Aston Villa into second place and Blackburn into second place. [United] were a really good team and that is to their detriment. Similarly, even though they were hampered by the foreigners rule in Europe, they failed in Europe as well, so it’s hard to include that team in the conversation.
“Chelsea are the only other the other team who retained the Premier League. They got a lot of points, they did it in dominating style – they won from the front – and they did well in Europe as well. Even though they didn’t win the Champions League in those years, the same group of players got to the final in 2008 and they were an unfortunate slip away from winning it. Even in 2012, when they did win it, that was still the nucleus of that team.
The latest iteration of Manchester City under the guidance of Pep Guardiola is one of the teams to miss out... for now.
“I look at that team and think there’s a lot of scope for them to get better. I am not disrespecting what they have done this season, which is phenomenal – they play some unbelievable football, they’ve strolled the league in an unbelievable manner. But when I look at that criteria again – what did you win? – one league and one Carabao Cup is good. Who did you beat? No-one. I think we are more-or-less agreed that this United team are not good and they are second place in the league.
“Then you look at what they did in their biggest games. Because they made the league look so easy, their biggest games were Liverpool in the Champions League – where they got walloped 5-1 on aggregate. The other game was that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to beat United to the league and they collapsed in that game as well. These, to me, are quite big black marks.”
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