City barely break a sweat without Tevez; Carroll answers his critics

Five thoughts from Saturday's action in the Barclays Premier League:

1. Just warming up. This week provided a lesson for any manager who thinks a player might be refusing to come off the bench: call his bluff and ask the assistant referee to hold up his number. Then if the player refuses to take off his track suit he cannot argue later, as Carlos Tévez did this week, that it was simply a misunderstanding over whether he needed to warm up first.

Of course, Roberto Mancini's proclamation that, following Tuesday's loss at Bayern Munich, Tévez would never play for Manchester City again merely put the manager where the Argentine striker was in the summer. When Tévez said he never wanted to play for City again, the club refused to sell him. It did buy Sergio Agüero as a replacement in any case.

The issue in Munich seems to have been Mancini's first substitution when, with his team two goals down, he replaced a striker, Edin Dzeko, with Nigel De Jong, a defensive midfielder. Tévez was insulted. So too was Dzeko, who made that clear as he left the field. On Saturday, Dzeko paid for his minor snit by being banished to the bench for City's visit to Blackburn. That paragon of mature behavior, Mario Balotelli, started instead.

After barely 20 minutes of Mancini's post-Tévez era, Agüero damaged a groin muscle. Dzeko bounced off the bench to warm up by the corner flag, but even warming up, it seems, is not always enough. Mancini sent on Samir Nasri instead, which meant Balotelli moved into the center of attack. It barely mattered.

City took its time, but eventually overpowered Rovers. Adam Johnson curled in a neat shot after 56 minutes. Balotelli finished like a true striker three minutes later. Nasri and another substitute, Stefan Savic, completed a 4-0 rout.

The loss to Bayern brought out the flaws in the City squad. The crushing victory at Blackburn reminded us that this is still a very powerful team.

2. Just cooling down? Not all the bizarre headlines in Manchester this week belonged to City. David de Gea, the young United goalkeeper, was apparently caught on a security camera eating a donut in a supermarket and then leaving without paying for it. One tabloid demanded that he be put in "custardy" another claimed he had "sticky fingers."

De Gea did not start against Norwich on Saturday, but Alex Ferguson said it was because the goalie would be in the Spanish squad for internationals next week while his replacement, Anders Lindegaard, is not in the Danish squad and could do with a game. De Gea, in short, needed a break. He deserves it. Even though United is top of the league, it had allowed more shots on goal in its first six games than any other team in the Premier League and De Gea had made more saves, far more, than any other goalie. He was also been busy, and good, on Tuesday in the Champions League, but by the end of a second half in which United conceded three goals to Basel, the young Spaniard looked shell shocked.

Bringing in Lindegaard did not make much difference. For the first three-quarters of the game, Norwich massed in front of its goal and relied on long balls to Steve Morison. Yet, even against a one-man attack, the United defense repeatedly parted like a red sea. A combination of panicky finishing, the woodwork and well-timed late interventions by Phil Jones kept United in the game until. Anderson, who is 5-foot-9, broke the deadlock by outleaping the Norwich defense to head powerfully into the net after 68 minutes. Danny Welbeck settled the Old Trafford nerves with a second with two minutes left.

The 2-0 victory kept United top of the league. Rio Ferdinand, returning from another injury, added some calm when he came on in the last 25 minutes. Despite the chaos in front of him, Lindegaard could look up at the scoreboard at the end and see a zero. He can be pleased with his donut.

3. Consistency counts. The Premier League likes to boast that part of its appeal is that on any given Saturday any team in the league can beat any other. It's not quite true, and it's become steadily less true over the last decade. But the real difference maker is not what the teams outside the top three can do on their best days; it's what they do on their bad days. You might beat Liverpool and draw with Manchester United, as Stoke have done this season, but, if, in between, you lose, 4-0, at Sunderland, you can never escape midtable.

That's what makes the unbeaten starts of Aston Villa and Newcastle, so intriguing.

Alex McLeish has almost instantly made Aston Villa as hard to beat as his Birmingham City team was. On Saturday, Villa stretched its unbeaten start to seven games. Yet Villa is only sixth. It has drawn five of those games. Not losing is good, but not if it's achieved by not winning. Yet Villa has two players who can score goals, Darren Bent and Gabby Agbonlahor and both did in a 2-0 victory over Wigan.

Newcastle is four points and three places better off. It won 2-1 at Wolves on Saturday and is panting on the heels of the two Manchester clubs. Demba Ba continued his hot streak by nodding the first then the hulking and hairy Jonas Gutierrez, looking like a Lionel Messi imitation put together by Count Frankenstein, slalomed through the Wolves defense to add the second before halftime. Newcastle ended the match clinging on. Its goalie Tim Krul made a string of saves.

Alan Pardew, the Newcastle manager, cheerily told the BBC "we were lucky today." But then he probably doesn't want to draw attention to his team by saying they deserve to be third. There are 31 games left. As McLeish's Birmingham showed last season, even the most seemingly solid team can collapse.

4. The crabby king. When Kenny Dalglish returned as Liverpool manager in January of this year, he seemed to have transformed into Kuddly Kenny, basking in the adoration of the Anfield faithful. This season, however, the pressure is on and it hasn't taken long for the Krabby Kenny, so familiar to any journalist who covered Liverpool during Dalglish's first reign, to resurface. Then, Dalglish would let interviewers know when he didn't like a question and, frankly, there were a lot of questions he didn't like.

King Kenny's first spell in charge at Liverpool ended in 1991 with a 4-4 draw at Goodison. On Saturday, Liverpool did better, beating Everton, 2-0. Everton's midfield muscle, Jack Rodwell, was shown a controversial red card after 22 minutes. On a hot afternoon, Everton's 10 men held on until the last 20 minutes. Then Andy Carroll and Luis Suarez punished a wilting defense.

When the BBC reporter opened his postmatch interview by asking Dalglish if Rodwell's dismissal had been unfair, Dalglish responded in vintage style. He looked away from the camera and, suppressing his smile, said: "I thought we were excellent in the game." Then he chastised the interviewer. "I think it's a bit harsh when that's your first question out of the door."

This is quite a contrast to the Dalglish who seemed only to want to talk about referees after his team lost at Stoke on September 10. The point here is not that Dalglish is a grumpy old man. He's always been grumpy with the media. It's that like almost every manager, he is rather one-eyed when it comes to referees.

Dalglish did not deny that Rodwell's sending off changed the game, but he also said that he hadn't seen the incident and didn't intend to watch replays. He simply didn't care that the red card for an opponent might have been unjust.

Managers, like fans, tend to work themselves into lather about injustices their teams have suffered. They take refereeing decisions that favor them rather for granted. They believe their team usually deserves to win. Therefore decisions against them deprive their teams of their just desserts, while decisions in their favor should not be allowed to obscure the fact that victory was deserved. Since the bad decisions seem to matter more and live longer in the memory, managers and fans tend to shrug off the good breaks as inadequate payback.

Indeed part of the point of Dalglish's complaints last month, might have been to pressure referees into making decisions in favor of his team (in contrast to the Rodwell decision, Atkinson also correctly gave Liverpool a penalty which Tim Howard saved), not that Dalglish seemed to derive any satisfaction from that.

5. What Carroll does. For 71 minutes the Everton fans enjoyed telling Andy Carroll that he was a waste of money. Certainly, for much of the match Carroll did less and he did it less well and less elegantly than Liverpool's other big-money striker, Suarez. Carroll attracted the huge transfer fee because, for a big man, he seemed unusually skillful and quick. He looked neither on Saturday. Yet he had two good headers on target from corners. Then, after Craig Bellamy came on and injected some pace on the left flank, setting up Jose Enrique for a cross, Carroll found space in the penalty area and finished with a spin and shot in the manner of a true center forward. Can Carroll and Liverpool find the formula to repeat the trick at least 20 times a season?

Peter Berlin has been following English soccer for 45 years and reporting on it for 25 years.