Four days on from making the net ripple against Swansea City in his native Wales during the second round of the EFL Cup, Bournemouth winger David Brooks continued his fairytale return to the Cherries’ setup against Brentford, scoring his first Premier League goal in 1144 days following his Non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis.
Brooks’s 77th-minute strike propelled the visitors into a slender advantage at the Gtech Community Stadium after Dominic Solanke had cancelled out a Mathias Jensen opener, but Bournemouth would be made to wait for their first top-flight win of the season, as Bryan Mbeumo raced through to equalise in the third minute of injury time.
Amid all the plaudits for Iraola’s forward-thinking style of football, Bournemouth went into the two-week hiatus with only two points on the board from their opening four Premier League fixtures, good enough for 16th place in the table at this premature stage.
Holding Brentford to a score draw at the Gtech fortress is nothing to be sniffed at, though, and few would have expected the Cherries to glean any points from their meetings with Tottenham Hotspur or Liverpool, although they gave the latter a good run for their money early on.
However, the hosts’ dismal sequence of results means that they have now gone eight top-flight games without success since thumping Leeds United 4-1 at the end of April, while their only clean sheet in their last 12 Premier League matches came against a doomed Southampton.
Most of Chelsea’s senior stars were given the night off as a second-string team scraped past Wimbledon in the second round of the EFL Cup, but the youngsters’ mediocre performance evidently did not inspire the seniors when Nottingham Forest paid another visit to Stamford Bridge.
A few months on from taking a point back to base after a 2-2 draw in West London, Forest quelled the expensively-assembled Chelsea XI and broke the deadlock just three minutes into the second half, as the deadly Taiwo Awoniyi-Anthony Elanga combination ended with the latter firing home.
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Thanks to some steadfast defending and wasteful Chelsea finishing – Nicolas Jackson in particular was guilty of a howler – Forest travelled home with a well-earned maximum, giving Mauricio Pochettino two weeks to dissect another underwhelming display.
So far this season, only Luton Town have failed to take points off Chelsea in the Premier League, where the Blues are occupying a familiar 12th place in the table, and Pochettino can expect his defence to be tested to the extreme in subsequent meetings with Aston Villa (Premier League) and Brighton & Hove Albion (EFL Cup) before the month is up.
A record of two wins from 16 Premier League affairs is simply abysmal for a club of Chelsea’s spending power, although one of those triumphs was a 3-1 win over Bournemouth at the Vitality Stadium back in May, which extended the Blues’ victorious streak over their South Coast foes to three contests.
