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Premier League hot or not

What’s sexy, and unsexy, in football this week…

HOT

Pards
It was only a year ago that the popular Geordie website SackPardew.com was launched amid much fanfare and an extensive leafleting campaign in which Alan Pardew’s face was held aloft by thousands of Newcastle fans demanding his immediate destruction. But like his nearly namesake Alan Partridge, this Al has bounced back. Crystal Palace’s inexorable rise under their white-haired manager’s tutelage culminated in Pardew being embraced with something approaching genuine respect by Jose Mourinho after the Eagles’ 2-1 win at Chelsea on Saturday. Palace sit second in the table while the creators of SackPardew.com await their first win of the season. In the words of Shakin Stevens, “Lovely stuff”.

Panthers
Swansea’s Bafetimbi Gomis has started this season so well that you half-expect him to slap in a transfer request and demand a transfer deadline day £55m move Chelsea. His mastery of the lone striker role in the Swans’ victory against Manchester United should frighten centre-backs across the Premier League, especially little ones like Daley Blind. But even more terrifying is Gomis’s post-goal celebration, in which gets on all fours and inhabits the part of a blood-thirsty panther with such conviction that many of his own fans could be seen running away for fear of being eaten. You won’t see a better celebration in the Premier League this season, unless Wayne Rooney and Harry Kane have got something massive lined up if they ever find the net again.

Lowering your hands
The most inexcusable act of petulance from a footballer is “raising your hands” to an opponent and getting sent off, even if all you did was flick their ear. It’s exactly why Stoke’s Ibrahim Afellay could have no complaints about his red card after giving West Brom’s Craig Gardner a flimsy slap around the chops at the Britannia on Saturday. Stoke might be peeved that Gardner stayed on the field despite slapping Afellay, but the crucial difference was that Afellay was on the ground at the time, meaning Gardner had to stoop to hit him. So he didn’t raise his hands, he merely lowered them. Respect to the Baggies midfielder for finding a loophole that should allow players to chin each other with gay abandon from now on (as long as one of them is on the ground).

NOT

Branislav Ivanovic
What on earth has happened to Branislav Ivanovic over the summer? Did his marriage hit the rocks? Did he go gluten free? Did he swap souls with Eddie Murphy so that he could make comedy films in Hollywood and leave Murphy’s dismembered brain trying desperately to operate the body of a Chelsea full-back? Whatever the reason, the formerly indomitable Serbian defender is not the man he was. And when Mourinho singled out “two or three players” for being “far from good” in the Blues’ home defeat to Palace and added, “I blame myself for not changing one of them,” it was clear to everyone at Stamford Bridge that the player was Ivanovic. He was the only one bad enough to merit such a harsh appraisal. Whether he needs to let Eddie Murphy have his body back, or merely put in some hard yards on the training pitch, Ivanovic must sort himself out soon.

Aleksandar Mitrovic
Any Newcastle fans who were energised by their new Serbian striker’s feisty approach are officially bored with it by now, after the 20-year-old followed up two yellow cards in his first Magpies appearances with a fully deserved straight red against Arsenal. If Mitrovic wanted to show the Toon Army that he is some kind of hard nut, then he has made his point. We get it. So he can stop kicking people now.

Roger Hunt
It may seem harsh to pick on England’s 1966 World Cup winner, given that he didn’t play any Premier League football this week and had no bearing on anything that happened, but it’s either him or Dejan Lovren. And it’s hard not to feel sorry for Lovren, whose defensive incompetence helped West Ham win at Liverpool for the first time in 52 years - one of the top flight’s most infamous winless streaks. The Hammers’ last victory at Anfield came in September 1963, when a team containing Hunt lost 2-1. But the real question is, how did Hunt and co contrive to lose to a side who wouldn’t beat them for another half a century? At least, that’s the question Dejan Lovren is asking.

@darlingkevin