IT WAS CHRISTIAN Eriksen who scored in momentous circumstances with a typically well-struck free kick to make it Tottenham 2-2 Everton in the 75th minute yesterday.

The Dane’s effort was the 1,067th goal of the Premier League 2018-19 campaign.

That tally is a record for a 38-game season.

Five more goals were scored after Eriksen’s equaliser, with Arsenal’s Eddie Nketiah scoring the 1,072nd and final goal of the campaign in the Gunners’ win over Burnley.

City also scored more goals than anyone else this season (95), ahead of Liverpool in second (89).

Pep Guardiola’s side could not, however, match their record-breaking tally of last season, when they scored on 106 occasions.

The Etihad outfit’s 4-1 win over Brighton ensured they pipped Jurgen Klopp’s men to the title by a solitary point, ending a remarkable week of football that has seen two of the greatest comebacks in Premier League history carried out by Liverpool and Tottenham, with both sides coming back from three goals down at various points in the tie.

Yet as surprising as these improbable triumphs were, they also came with an odd sense of deja vu.

Liverpool’s famous recovery against AC Milan in 2005, coming from 3-0 down in the Champions League final to draw 3-3 and win the tie on penalties, felt so rare and unusual that it was dubbed ‘The Miracle of Istanbul’. Yet such outcomes are no longer so unique. Barcelona have been involved in two others in recent years. The Catalan side lost 4-0 to PSG in the first leg of their 2016-17 clash, before winning the second leg 6-1, in the process becoming the first side in the competition’s history to come back from four goals down. And last year, Barca beat Roma 4-1 at home, only to lose the return leg 3-0 and exit the competition.

This year, there was also PSG beating United 2-0 at Old Trafford and losing 3-1 at home.

And again this season, Atletico Madrid held a seemingly insurmountable 2-0 first-leg lead, before losing 3-0 in Turin against Juventus.

2018-19 – Christian Eriksen’s goal was the 1067th Premier League goal this season; more goals than any other 38-game season of the competition. Glut.

— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) May 12, 2019

So why has there been a disproportionate number of Champions League comebacks in recent years and what does it have to do with the Premier League goals record?

Well, the astronomical figures in England’s top flight are reflected by the trends in Europe’s premier club competition.

Since the European Cup became the Champions League ahead of the 1992-93 season, the lowest goals tally for a single year remains 1994-95, when an average of 2.3 goals were scored, or 140 goals from 61 matches.

While the number of matches played in the competition has increased, the amount of goals scored per game initially remained relatively steady, fluctuating around the two mark until recently. In 2016-17, however, it broke the three mark for the first time, with 3.04 (380 goals from 125 matches) and it followed suit the next year, with 3.21 (401 goals from 125 matches). This season, the figured has lessened but only slightly, with 2.94 (364 goals from 124 matches and counting).

But focus on the knockout stages alone and you will notice some fairly remarkable aggregate results — 10-2, 5-3, 4-3 and 5-1 are some of the outcomes in the round of 16, the quarters ended 4-4, 3-2, 4-0 and 6-1, while the two semis were 4-3 and 3-3.

The recurring theme is elite sides’ apparent inability to defend properly. Can you imagine the Arrigo Sacchi-managed AC Milan side of the late ’80s and early ’90s letting a three-goal lead slip in a crucial, season-defining game as Barca and Ajax did, or even Rafa Benitez-era Liverpool doing so?

This week’s remarkable European action, as well as the record-breaking Premier League tally, are further proof that defending, as we know it, is a dying art.

There are very few rugged, no-nonsense centre-backs in the mould of John Terry at the top level any more. Being comfortable on the ball is seen as essential for a defender, and sometimes these qualities come at the expense of the basics associated with stopping the opponent scoring. Vincent Kompany is perhaps the most obvious anomaly, but at 33, the experienced star’s days in the game are numbered.

You could counteract claims that there is a decline of great defending by pointing to City and Liverpool’s stats, as they conceded just 23 and 22 Premier League goals respectively this season — not too far off the 2004-05 incarnation of Chelsea, who hold the record of fewest goals conceded in a season with 15.

But the caveat as far as the two teams from this year are concerned is that both rarely actually have to do any defending as they partake in a series of extremely one-sided contests, with the league’s increasingly excessive TV funds creating a greater wealth disparity than ever between the best and the rest.

Inferior sides invariably stick 11 men behind the ball against the top clubs, but still fail to contain them while seldom putting their centre-backs under considerable pressure. You could say the same for La Liga, where Barcelona have a similarly excellent record at the back, with just 34 goals conceded. But ‘defensively sound’ is not a phrase that would immediately spring to mind watching the Catalan side crumble and concede four at Anfield on Tuesday night.

The issue is that these teams are so rarely tested domestically than when they face a genuinely formidable attack in Europe, they are ill-prepared.

In 38 Premier League games this season, City conceded two goals on just three occasions and three goals just once — four matches that happened to be the only four games they lost all season (against Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Leicester and Newcastle). In their entire successful EFL Cup run, meanwhile, they conceded just one goal. But in 10 Champions League games, they conceded two goals on three occasions and three goals once. When they most desperately needed to be defensively sound, they conceded three in the one match against Tottenham and exited the competition on away goals. Compare that, for instance, to the Liverpool side of 2005 — a far inferior team to the present City group, but who conceded just three times in the group stages and three times up to the final, beating Chelsea 1-0 on aggregate in the semis.

There are other caveats too, of course. Defenders nowadays take more risks playing out from the back and are consequently bound to come unstuck with increasing regularity — even some of the weakest teams in the league, such as Huddersfield, have adopted this once-inconceivable policy of invariably refusing to go long.

So football at the top level is arguably as entertaining as ever, with some phenomenal attack play and intelligent tactics being employed to turn some seemingly unwinnable matches around. But defence is one area that appears to have suffered unduly amid this goal-crazy revolution.

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