6 of the Best Moments From a Scintillating Weekend of Premier League Action

Published on: 05 February 2017

Right, have we all quite recovered from a manic weekend of, well, just about everything? Goals galore, scorchers everywhere, and...y'know, the Super Bowl also happened.


But this isn't about the Evil Empire coming back from the dead in Houston, this is about the Premier League. So...

Best Goal

This isn't even really a contest, is it? Romelu Lukaku's first for Everton was a curling, fizzing beauty that left Artur Boruc absolutely nowhere, and Manolo Gabbiadini's high, angled finish against West Ham showed impressive cojones for a man on debut - but Eden Hazard's strike in Chelsea's demolition of Arsenal stands apart from the best of them.


Picking the ball up around the halfway line, the itty bitty Belgian shrugged off the attentions of Arsenal's Meathead in Chief Francis Coquelin so effectively that the red-shirted lumbering hunk of failure did about 17 flips over his own feet.


From there, Hazard tied the rest of the Gunners' defence in knots before firing deftly past old ally Petr Cech to seal the three points - and the title - for Antonio Conte's men.

Best Celebration

Ross Barkley might be an actual hero. With Everton counter-attacking at the end of the game andBournemouth more or less beaten, Barkley rounded an onrushing Boruc about 25 yards out from goal and, in full schoolboy tradition, began celebrating before he'd even fired the ball into the back of the net.


The predictable hand-wringing began among the world's most boring people on social media ('disrespectful!' 'what if he'd missed?!' 'I can't reach completion without a complex system of levers and pulleys!' etc), but come on. Football is better for people who play with joy, and that was pure joy.

Best Assist

Boss Rarkley, step forward (again). Leading 4-2 in a topsy-turvy game, most players might opt to keep hold of the ball; to play conservatively and see the last 10 minutes out.


Barkley isn't most players. Barkley scores celebragoals. Barkley took a single touch to control the ball and flicked a backheel between two defenders and set Romelu Lukaku free for his 196th goal of the game. If there's a lesson to be learned from this weekend, at all, it's that we should all try to be a little more Ross Barkley.

Best Assault

It'd be easy to couch this in euphemistic terms, call Juan Mata's tackle on Jamie Vardy a 'crunching challenge', or 'a bit mistimed'. It wasn't. It was a full-on assault. That was Mata looking at Leicester's most famous racial abuser and seeing him as the physical embodiment of all the goalkeepers United have been frustrated by in recent weeks.


It was Mata deciding that, just once, he could stop being the lovable, jovial playmaker in United's midfield. Instead, he morphed into Charlie Adam, Lee Cattermole and Paul Scholes all rolled into one, and just thudded through Vardy like he'd just found him with his dog, a rubber glove and some Vaseline.


It was brilliant.

Best Save

He might've ruined it later with weak work to let Gabriel Jesus in for the Manchester City winner, but Lukasz Fabianski kept his Swansea side in the game up until those final seconds - not least with a brilliant flying save to keep out a Yaya Toure free kick, which left the Ivorian shaking his head in disbelief.

Best Redemption

Oumar Niasse might be...good? There was always a feeling that his problems at Everton owed as much to problems behind the scenes as they did his performances on the pitch, and the Senegalese forward's attitude to training with the Under-23s at Finch Farm (keep powering through, bang in goals for fun, work and work and work) seems to have served him well.


More than a year after signing for Everton for £13.5m, Niasse's lightning counter-attacking run; featuring a brilliantly improvised flick to control the ball, brought him his first Premier League goal. Against who? His parent club's old rivals, Liverpool. Watch out for more from Oumar Niasse - it's coming.

For more from Chris when he's not writing on 90min, follow him on Twitter at @ThatChris1209


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