Premier League winners & losers features frustrating Spurs in both halves of the draw

Your Boxing Day Premier League winners and losers features two guys called Eddie, several struggling managers and Spurs in both camps.

Winners

Just about all of the top half of the Premier League
This was a good round of fixtures for the teams in the top half of the Premier League table. It was a quirk of the fixture computer that the Boxing Day matches broadly pitted the top half of the table against the bottom half, and of the the 10 teams in the former section, eight of them won while the only two to be playing each other drew.

Furthermore, it didn’t feel as though any of those teams that did win had to work particularly hard to do so. Arsenal, Manchester City, Newcastle, Manchester United, Liverpool, Brighton and Fulham all scored three goals each, while Chelsea scored twice in the first half and Spurs and Brentford scored twice against each other.

People called ‘Eddie’
This was a very good round of fixtures for two very different Edwards.

Eddie Howe could have been forgiven for wishing more than anybody else that the winter break didn’t come when it did. Newcastle went into it off the back of seven wins in their previous eight games, and the obvious concern at such a point was that the team won’t be able to rediscover that form after the distraction of a World Cup.

There was little indication in their 3-0 win at Leicester that this interruption had even taken place. Newcastle strolled to a three-goal lead in 32 minutes, including two goals in the first seven minutes, a result which briefly lifted them back into second place in the table. Miguel Almiron chipped in with another goal. It still feels improbable that Newcastle can sustain a title challenge, but they haven’t lost in the league since August 31 and will not have the distraction of European football throughout the second half of the season. They couldn’t… could they?

At the other end of the A1(M), this was also a good round of fixtures for Arsenal’s Eddie Nketiah. A World Cup injury to Gabriel Jesus, Arsenal’s most impressive player from a highly impressive first half of the season, had raised questions over whether they’d be able to maintain their stunning start throughout the winter months. But these fears feel somewhat baseless after Nketiah added a third goal to complete Arsenal’s comeback after falling behind to a first-half West Ham penalty.

Nketiah’s game has come on in leaps and bounds over the last 12 months or so. After this performance, it…