Big Questions for GW22

What's on our minds going into the twenty-second week of the season?

Welcome back to the Overthinking Football Gameweek Preview. It’s Week 22 and we’ve got a complete slate of games in one midweek round.

We’ve been hard at work trawling through the upcoming fixtures, consuming player news and looking at our Overthinking Football Projections Model to make sense of what we’re likely to see this weekend.

As ever, in looking at what’s coming up I have questions. This week I’m asking:

• Is there a post-news hangover at Anfield?

• Eze for number one?

• Are we getting good Bournemouth or bad Bournemouth this week?

• How should Vincent Kompany be feeling about his Etihad return?

• Pedro Neto: back?

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How will the Liverpool players react to the big news out of Anfield?

One of the most interesting aspects coming into this season was the near-complete rebuild of Liverpool’s midfield. Alongside a slow-rebuild of the attack that won them their first Premier League title, this seemed to be Jurgen Klopp’s opportunity to shape a new Liverpool in his desired image. And it all seems to be going pretty well. They still look light at defensive midfield, but their play has them sitting top of the Premier League, despite their efforts in the first quarter of the season to never actually play a full game with eleven players on the field and despite not having their star-forward Mo Salah for the month of January. But what is difficult to account for is the toll that competing at the top of the Premier League year-on-year can take and, unless you’ve been sitting with your head firmly in the sand for the last week, you’ll have heard that Jurgen Klopp intends to depart at the end of this season to avoid burning out.

Admirable as that decision is, we are very intrigued what impact it has on his side. Is this a (self-imposed) Phil Jackson-esque exit with a title in hand kind of year? Or will the prospect of change unsettle Liverpool’s fairly newly formed squad cohesion? We get a mouth-watering matchup as the first test of that, with Chelsea visiting Anfield. I know, I know. It’s been years since Chelsea have been at Liverpool’s level in the league, right? But these two seem to always just play each other close in recent years. At the start of the season the two played out a 1-1 draw that looked like it was presenting more questions for Liverpool’s prospects than Chelsea’s. That feels like a long time ago now.

The story of that first game was the striker that Liverpool didn’t start (Darwin Nunez) and (if you can stretch your memory back and believe it) how good the one Chelsea did start (Nicolas Jackson) had played. This time out, Nunez is a near certainty to start and sits 4th amongst expected starters in our xFpts projections. Jackson, on the other hand, remains on International Duty, likely forcing Chelsea back into their striker-less set-up. Chelsea have had a boost with Christopher Nkunku likely to be fit enough to play a role, but a start seems unlikely. Though these tend to be tight and close-scoring affairs, we’re backing goals in this one regardless. It’s not a week to fade any of the Liverpool attackers and, as usual, we still love Cole Palmer’s Fantrax prospects in any matchup (10th in projected xFpts). It’s anyone’s guess who is chosen to accompany him for Chelsea, though Raheem Sterling is almost guaranteed. We also expect another start for Ben Chilwell who is almost always startable based on his attacking contributions. The likely absence of Levi Colwill (injured before the FA Cup match against Aston Villa) does mean that Chilwell’s chances of starting as a left-sided midfielder are reduced, though.

Make no mistake, Liverpool are rightly favourites. But given this is a typically close-matchup, now with added emotion, we’re hoping this is an absolute fire-cracker of a matchup.

Liverpool vs Chelsea - 8.15pm UK, 3.15pm US kickoff, Wednesday

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Can Eberechi Eze live up to his billing as this week’s highest-projected player?

One of the toughest things about modern Premier League football is that for an awful lot of teams, the sensible goal for a league season is to do as much as you can for as little money as you can. It’s not romantic, it’s not always enjoyable for the fans, but it does makes sense. Crystal Palace are a team that falls into that camp. Whilst others around them are risking big FFP fines (often without significantly moving the dial in terms of points performance), Crystal Palace operate relatively prudently when it comes to incoming signings. When Eberechi Eze signed for the club from QPR back in 2020, it represented their only signing of more than £1m that season. No one watching Crystal Palace in the four years since would think there was a single penny of that fee wasted. Especially since the departure of Wilfried Zaha, Eze is Crystal Palace.