Manchester City’s shocking 4-1 loss to Tottenham Saturday afternoon proved that the Premier League title race is still wide open, and later in the day Manchester United moved to the top of the Premier League table with an easy win over Sunderland, while Arsenal beat Leicester City.
Defending champion Chelsea seemed to have snapped out of its early-season slump with three consecutive wins in all competitions and were heavy favorites over 19th place Newcastle Saturday — but the Blues’ shockingly bad defending cost the team once again. Ayoze Pérez gave Newcastle the lead just before halftime, and Georginio Wijnaldum doubled the advantage on a corner kick in the 60th minute, breaking free of Cesc Fabregas in the penalty area to win an unmarked header.
Newcastle was just 12 minutes away from its first Premier League win of the season, but Brazilian midfielder Ramires gave Chelsea a lifeline in the 79th minute with a sensational strike to the top left corner.Ramires appeared to score a second just a few minutes later to equalize the game, but it was Willian’s curling free kick that went untouched past goalkeeper Tim Krul to make it 2-2. Ramires had one final chance to win the game in the final minutes, but Krul saved his header from close range to earn Newcastle a point.
Jose Mourinho branded Chelsea‘s first-half performance at Newcastle as the worst of his reign after seeing them fight back to snatch a 2-2 Barclays Premier League draw.
The Portuguese gave his team a “minus one out of 10” rating for their first 45 minutes at St James’ Park and blamed individual errors for gifting the Magpies 2-0 lead.
Asked if that was as badly as the Blues had played under him, Mourinho said: “Yes, for sure.
“I have played so many matches with Chelsea over seven years and we have had some bad performances. I remember one at Middlesbrough in 2005, 2006, something like that, we were losing at half-time 3-0, so we have had a few.
“But this first half, I can rate as one of those performances, yes. I put it down to awful individual performances. When you have so many bad individual performances, it’s impossible for a team to be a team.”
Newcastle forced their way ahead – and deservedly so – three minutes before the break when Ayoze Perez took advantage of indecisive defending to volley home from Vurnon Anita’s cross, and when Georginio Wijnaldum headed home Perez’s 60th-minure corner, a fourth successive home win over the Blues looked to be on the cards.
However, Mourinho quickly shuffled his pack and two of his substitutes did the trick when Ramires reduced the deficit with a 79th-minute piledriver and Willian levelled direct from a free-kick with just four minutes remaining.
The Chelsea boss is yet to win a league game on Tyneside and had lost on his previous three visits, and that led him to question Newcastle’s mentality.
He said: “I think maybe one of the reasons why Newcastle over the years doesn’t get good positions is because of this mentality, it’s because they choose some matches to sweat blood and in other matches, they don’t.
“This is an attitude typical of a team that wins nothing. It’s bad for them because if they play like this, they win many matches at home, and they don’t. But this is their problem.
“The reality is that they fought hard, they gave everything, they followed a line that many pundits gave straight away – you have to fight, you have to kick, you have to tackle, you have to run, so they were exactly that, and they fought for a point, and I think they deserved a point the way they fought.”
Willian’s late equaliser denied Magpies head coach Steve McClaren a first league win, but he was able to take positives from a vastly-improved display in which summer signing Aleksandar Mitrovic played a significant role on his return from suspension.
McClaren said: “It’s difficult to know what to think after that, and then you have got to try to come back down and put it into some kind of perspective, and that’s what we must do, put it in perspective in terms of performance, in terms of reaction and in terms of what we have got.
“What you got was a collective togetherness, which we talked about a lot, and that wasn’t just the players and the dressing room and the staff, that was the supporters because after this week, the supporters could have just waited and seen what was going to happen.
“But they didn’t, they responded from the first whistle and that’s what’s unique about this football club, this set of fans, and the players responded and gave a performance which was more like what we want – attitude, character, organised, really disciplined and courage to play, and we played some good football.
“In the end, we could have won it; in the end, we could have lost it. With five or six minutes to go, the momentum had swung and to hang on in there.
“Yes, it was a good display, but that’s the benchmark now, that’s the standard.”
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