The whiff of Premier League failure is in the air as the smoke clears from Bonfire Night.

It always feels this way by the time we get to the November international break.

Managers and their players have had time to settle in and teething problems no longer cut it as a reason for autumn struggles.

Worst of all, Christmas is coming and we all know what tends to happen to teams who are struggling as the end of the year nears.

So at places like Manchester United, Crystal Palace, Sunderland, Newcastle and Spurs there is anxiety about expectations not being met.

But why not at Chelsea?

Xabi Alonso's side would appear to be the team that is failing without anybody seeming to notice.

At Stamford Bridge, the environment is conducive to Alonso and his team doing well this season.

Chelsea – not in Europe after last season's troubles – are only playing once a week. So Alonso – hired for his coaching reputation – has time on the grass with players who should arrive every weekend with freshness in their legs.

It's the environment that enabled Michael Carrick to fool everyone at Manchester United last season. While the rest of the Premier League got bogged down in the schedule, United sailed upwards on the back of a lighter load.

So why not Chelsea?

When we look at Alonso's team we see only familiar Chelsea things – and not in a good way. 

Inconsistent tactics, some strange selections and, on the back of it, some very ordinary results.

This is the cycle Alonso was hired to break and he is not yet succeeding.

Sunday's defeat to Sunderland can be added to league setbacks against Spurs, Brentford and Arsenal. 

They were unimpressive in beating United a couple of weeks ago also. Carrick's team outplayed them in the first half and should have been two or three goals ahead.

Under Alonso, Chelsea are yet to establish an identity or discernible patterns. It is hard to know yet what his best back four (or five) looks like. In the absence of the injured striker Joao Pedro, Alonso seems happier to play without one rather than use Danny Welbeck, signed for just this scenario in the summer.

The absence of Joao Pedro is significant while Alonso is also without his first choice goalkeeper Emi Martinez. These things matter.

But Chelsea have a huge squad of international players. Maybe it's too big. Whatever the case Alonso must get the best out of it soon.

Nobody seems to be talking about how very underwhelming the whole thing feels. But if it continues, they soon will be.

Why is Carrick getting a free pass?

On Match of the Day on Sunday night, football's most vanilla pundit Dion Dublin was asked whether Michael Carrick has done enough to keep his job.

'I think so,' said Dublin. 'I think Michael has all the tools but the players just aren't doing what they need to do.'

At every other club in the Premier League, under-performing players and the bad results that tend to follow lead to intense scrutiny and criticism of the manager. It's his job to affect these things.

Not at United, though, where the level of public and media support for Carrick remains extraordinary and illogical.

If we applied this level of leeway to everybody else then nobody would ever be sacked.

Yes, there are a number of factors at play at Old Trafford. Yes, we know what they are and who is to blame for them. Yes, it's a very difficult job.

But the truth is that Carrick is failing in a quite spectacular fashion.

Of all the managers to have followed Sir Alex Ferguson over the last 13 and a half years, Erik ten Hag was the one who looked most out of his depth in terms of the chaotic nature of his team's football.

Carrick is now on the way to eclipsing that. His team are a shambles and that's on him. Once again, this is a mediocre league and it's quite criminal that Carrick has his group of players in the bottom three.

The former Middlesbrough manager is so out of his depth it's quite painful to watch. 

Why does nobody else seem to see that?

Garnacho running out of chances

It was another extraordinary afternoon at Old Trafford as United drew 4-4 with Aston Villa.

Unai Emery's Villa team is going through yet another regeneration after the sale of big-name players in the summer and balancing the Champions League with domestic football will once again be a challenge.

Emery seems to have made his mind up about one of his squad members, though, after former United and Chelsea winger Alejandro Garnacho was left out of the squad entirely yesterday.

Garnacho is a talented player but has made only 14 Premier League starts – and none at Villa – since leaving Old Trafford for Chelsea in the summer of 2025.

The Argentine is still only 22 so time is on his side but at some point he is going to have to do something on the field to justify the investment in a career that is currently going nowhere.

Davison wins touchline battle

Sky's excellent touchline reporter Patrick Davison had his work cut out post-match at Old Trafford as he interviewed one manager in danger of the sack and another who had just flounced down the tunnel like a chap with his pants on fire.

Neither Michael Carrick nor Unai Emery seemed particularly comfortable in the face of Davison's questions and that's exactly as it should be.

He is there to ask questions on behalf of a broadcaster that ploughs billions of pounds into our national sport each year. He is not there to apply soothing balm. 

There would appear to be many others happy to do that anyway.

The pressure is off 

Less impressive was the appearance of Sky's latest metric that appeared on screen during Nottingham Forest's dismantling of Manchester City on Saturday.

Titled simply 'pressures' it indicated that Forest were doing rather better at it than City.

But what did it mean? Does anybody know? Or indeed care?

Local influence still has a place 

Two seasons ago at the City Ground I saw local boy Ryan Yates give Casemiro such a chasing as Forest beat Manchester United that the great Brazilian was taken off before he was sent off. 

On Saturday by the river, Yates made his first league start of the season as Oliver Glasner’s team overwhelmed City.

Beforehand Yates gave an address to his team-mates. He told them about what it meant to play for the club and touched briefly on its history.

He told me once in an interview that he tends to tell all new arrivals at Forest what the two stars on the shirt actually mean – two European Cups won in 1979 and 1980.

It’s smart work by a lad who knows what football means in Nottingham and it was smart work by his manager who knew that his team needed an injection of something visceral to drag him from a trough of failure that was threatening to cost him his job.

Manchester United could probably do with a bit of that right now. So, possibly, could Chelsea and indeed Tottenham. At Liverpool, they lament the absence from the team of Trent Alexander-Arnold and Curtis Jones.

It takes an awful lot to make up a Premier League team these days. Place of birth is not a priority any more and that’s understandable. But sometimes it helps.

Gigi can't be undroppable

When was the last time an English team won the title with a poor goalkeeper?

Flick back over the last couple of decades and it's hard to find an example.

So what hope for Manchester City this season?

Gianluigi Donnarumma is anything but a poor goalkeeper but the problem is that he is playing like one and it is there that City's current problems start.

Enzo Maresca's back four looks shot to pieces and that often happens when they lose faith in the chap behind them.

Maresca says he won't change. 'My team is Gigi plus ten others,' is his take.

But it feels like a strange attitude.

His back up is 34-year-old Argentinean Geronimo Rulli, a member of his country's World Cup squad with nine caps to his name.

Rulli is well-travelled and has some pedigree. He was, for example, Villarreal's hero as they beat Manchester United in a Europa League final shoot out in 2021.

If Maresca trusts him then maybe now is the time to show it. If he doesn't then why did City sign him?

Glasner saw Palace woes coming

Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson is perhaps not quite what he once was at the age of 34 but produced a throwback performance for his team at Crystal Palace. Without him, Liverpool would not have won.

Nevertheless Palace's struggles go on and their coach Pierre Sage is in danger of losing his job.

However the south London club cannot say they were not warned about trouble ahead.

Former manager Oliver Glasner spent most of last season in a huff about what he saw as a failure by the Palace board to invest properly in the squad.

Palace have won twice in ten Premier League games this season and it seems Glasner may have been right.

Pearce nails a modern curse

Brighton continue to fly high and to produce such an energetic performance to beat Brentford having played away at Getafe in Europe on Thursday was testimony to the fitness of Fabian Hurzeler's squad.

The Seagulls were certainly helped by having to play against ten for an hour, though, and on Match of the Day the enduringly listenable Jonathan Pearce spoke for all of us as he watched Chema Andres go down after minimal contact to his cheek from Brentford's Igor Thiago.

'That was nothing, nothing, nothing,' said Pearce as Thiago walked off.

'The game has gone.'

Coming so soon after theatrics from Alexis MacAllister and Gabriel in the Liverpool-Arsenal game last week, the issue of players exaggerating facial contact to get opponents sent off remains a live one.

Brentford's manager Keith Andrews was measured on the issue but suggested the tactic was becoming 'a game within a game'.

It's a problem and referees head Howard Webb needs his officials to get a grip of it.

A Gross return on investment

Brighton's Pascal Gross has now created more than 25 chances for team-mates this season and that's more than anyone else in the Premier League.

Gross cost £1.2million when he returned to the club from Borussia Dortmund last January.

It constitutes another steal in the market by Brighton's stat boffins but this time they probably didn't need the data to convince them of its merits.

Cherries picking from below

Bournemouth, meanwhile, cast their net as widely as anybody these days and that includes all the way down the English pyramid.

The South Coast club – on an eight-match winning streak now under Marco Rose – have a relationship with yesterday's FA Cup giant killers Wimborne from the seventh tier.

Wimborne of the Southern League Premier South beat League Two Crawley in Round One and will this week send their Chilean teenage striker Angel Diaz for a trial at the Premier League club.

Sometimes it pays to stand still

Story of last season in the EFL was probably Lincoln City's promotion to the Championship where, after 15 games, they are just about keeping their heads above water in 21st place.

Architect of that incredible rise was former futsal coach Michael Skubala who rather sullied the romantic feel of it all by quitting almost immediately to join Bristol City.

This weekend Skubala's team were thrashed 5-0 at home by Norwich with the home fans singing that their manager would be 'sacked in the morning'.

Lincoln have already won at Ashton Gate, back in September, at the start of a run that has seen City win just two from ten.

Sometimes, it really does pay just to stay where you are.