After a lacklustre window transfer window, at least some of the weekend matches provided some drama. Here is what stuck with us:

JUMP TO: United's transfer window bungling exposed | Sunnier signs at Spurs | Yep, Liverpool are good | West Ham woes | Lampard's tough GK choice | Pearson effect gone? | Praising McNeil

Manchester City have now lost as many times in 25 games this season as they did in the previous two seasons combined. There are plenty of reasons for their fall away this season, but you wonder whether one of them is a sort of 'Pep fatigue', a team that has been working with Guardiola for so long and they're so regimented in their thinking and following of his doctrine, that all spontaneity and individual thought has been drummed out of them.

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That's a possible explanation for the chance that David Silva quite literally passed up against Manchester United in the Carabao Cup, and also a possible explanation for their profligacy against Tottenham on Sunday.

Perhaps they're just having a bad season, intimidated into submission by the merciless machine at Anfield, the sort of thing that can easily happen but they could recover from. But now that the Premier League is gone this season, it will be interesting to see how they respond next term.

United's transfer window bungling exposed again

Without wishing to go on about the transfer window now it has mercifully closed for a few months, Manchester United's performance against Wolves merely exposed again their lack of planning in recruitment. The excuse/explanation for their last-minute dash around assorted C-list forward targets was that Marcus Rashford's injury forced them into action, but that shouldn't have been the catalyst: really they needed another forward from the moment they knew Romelu Lukaku was going to leave last summer, a departure that made Anthony Martial their only senior centre-forward.

Martial was poor against Wolves, which is not proof that he is a poor player, but an inconsistent one. He should be an option, rather than the option. And United have known this since May, but it took them until the last hours of January to sign someone to help out in attack, so in that respect it perhaps wasn't a surprise that they had to settle for a 30-year-old who's been playing in China for three years, who they signed without conducting a medical.

The case for Odion Ighalo is that he is a 'proven' Premier League striker on a low-risk, six-month loan deal, but that ignores a couple of things. Firstly, United needed more than a "hey, we'll see how this goes and if it doesn't work, no harm, no foul" striker, they needed someone to replace Rashford's goals.

But it the 'proven' case doesn't really stack up either: Ighalo scored an ostensibly excellent 14 goals in his one full season in the Premier League for Watford, but 12 of those came before the turn of the year and in the first half of the following season before his move to China, he scored one and looked completely lost. You could just as easily make the argument that he just had a five-month purple patch, as you can that he's proven in England.

Expectations are now so low that Ighalo could be considered a success if he successfully runs onto the pitch without tripping over his bootlaces, but United need more than that, as the Wolves game displayed.

Better times ahead for Tottenham?

It might seem a bit churlish to not offer credit to Jose Mourinho after beating the defending champions, but even the most one-eyed Tottenham fan will recognise that the 2-0 win over City was a bit of a mugging. It's hardly the sign of a tactical masterclass when you're relying on your opponents missing a penalty, spurning a clutch of extremely presentable chances and having a man sent off.

Still, there were a few more signs of what Mourinho is trying to do, there were some phenomenal individual performances (Davinson Sanchez was terrific), and of course a terrific debut goal by Steven Bergwijn.

The continued absence of Harry Kane with no natural centre-forward replacement could be pretty interesting, because it naturally forces Mourinho to play a different way. Previously, we've assumed that the 'different way' would just be to play as they did against Liverpool, but it could also lead to a more exciting and dynamic forward line: while there's obviously a difference in ability, in terms of profile a trio of Bergwijn, Son Heung-min and Lucas Moura is not a million miles away from Liverpool's Mane-Firmino-Salah trifecta. The results will not be as spectacular, but it's not unreasonable to think that the style could be comparable.

Liverpool, as it turns out, are good

NB: some of the following requires some jumps in logic, as well as mental and mathematical gymnastics. But it's becoming increasingly difficult to find ways of expressing how dominant Liverpool are, so bear with us.

Liverpool's 4-0 win over Southampton was, as you'll know by now, their 24th win of the season, meaning they have 73 points from 25 games and stretching back to last season have taken 101 points from the last available 103.

With two-thirds of the campaign gone, they already have more points than 18 of their previous 27 seasons (two of which were 42-game seasons), but it's also worth looking at their 18 previous title winning seasons. As 12 of those came in the era of two points for a win, and there were varying numbers of games in those seasons, it requires some number-crunching, but converting those seasons into three-points for a win, 38-game campaigns, they have essentially already gained more points so far this term than they did in four previous seasons when they won the league.

Going back to this season, they've got as many points as fifth and sixth place combined. If they win their next six games, they're guaranteed to be champions, and it could happen even sooner than that. Were it not for the winter break, there's a genuine chance they could've been champions in February.

They're good, is what we're saying.