7 Truths: Sanchez is wondrous, Chelsea look like champions and Howe is the English Klopp

There's no shortage of statistical evidence that Alexis Sanchez is the Premier League's best player, but employing numbers to prove his brilliance feels quite absurd when we can instead use our eyes. Take his third goal against West Ham. He dummied Darren Randolph with such impudent guile it took three replays to work out just what he had done – this was the work of a man without peers, at least in this country. Please fight the urge to use him as the jumping-off point for a 'who's world class?' debate, and instead just enjoy this special talent. If he keeps playing like this, he won’t be around for long.

Life after Sir Alex Ferguson was always going to be tough for Manchester United, but four seasons later and the club are still struggling to cope with the reality of being a ‘normal’ club. Decades of dominance and a consistent ideology created generations of supporters unaware of the struggles that fans of every other club in the country goes through, and the reality of inconsistent signings, managerial flip-flopping and a lack of silverware is proving tough to take. But Sunday’s loss to Everton suggested that United really are a ‘normal’ team nowadays. The fear factor that helped them through tough matches is gone, the big-team decisions that they used to get come less frequently now, and the will-to-win is absent in too many of the players.

When Chelsea won titles under Jose Mourinho, and to a lesser extent Carlo Ancelotti, one of the most noticeable traits of their success was their tenacity in big matches. Against their rivals, even if they didn't play particularly well Chelsea would always seem to grind out results. Their heavy defeats against Liverpool and Arsenal were not in keeping with this but now things have changed. With their 3-4-3 formation Chelsea had dismantled poor Leicester and Manchester United sides but the games against Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City felt like real tests. In both games it could have been argued that Chelsea deserved to be a few goals down, but yet they came away from the matches with six points. A welcome return to form for fans of the Blues.

It is hard to understand quite why Alan Pardew is so roundly scorned. Every football manager is overconfident, otherwise they would never enter a profession of such scrutiny and pressure. But such is Pardew's stock that his remarks about Crystal Palace's new owners provoked a storm of criticism. "We have a lot of serious investors at the club who perhaps don't know a lot about football," said Pardew after the 3-0 win over Southampton. Patronising? Perhaps, but no more so than critics who imagine foreign owners are capricious enough to ditch the manager over a single crassly-worded sentence. Palace's dreadful form - Saturday's result notwithstanding - is a far more clear and present danger to Pardew's position.

Sunday’s 4-3 thriller on the south coast was confirmation, if we need it, that Eddie Howe is a quality manager. Simply taking on Liverpool toe-to-toe and not getting completely torn apart was enough to underline that, but the way Howe sets his team up and garners a positive attitude in his squad illustrates a multi-tiered element to his coaching ability. Howe is not at Klopp’s level yet, but the way his Cherries keep the ball, the intensity with which they transition and the energy he elicits from his players are all similar to that of the Bundesliga-winning coach. Eddie has a bright future ahead of him.

You could probably have forgiven Tony Pulis for not being 100% focused on West Brom's game against Watford. This week Pulis was ordered to pay £3.7m in damages to his former employers Crystal Palace for the way he left the club at the start of the 2014-15 season. Pulis has denied what has been said about him at the tribunal. If the events of the week had had any sort of impact on Pulis neither he nor his team showed it as they recorded a comfortable 3-1 win over the inconsistent Hornets. The result means that West Brom have begun January where they left November, not losing football games. Very quietly West Brom have moved from perennial survivors to a potentially top-half team, where they were under Steve Clarke, remember him? West Brom are now 7th in the table and travel to both Chelsea and Arsenal over the Christmas period. Pulis has a habit of wrecking title bids and he'll be smelling blood ahead of these games.

Was Barkley crying on the bench? Was he simply hiding his face as he came to terms with not being allowed to make an impact on the game? Either way, he needs to grow up. Barkley is not one of Everton’s better players, there are limited ways he can be used tactically, and – crucially – injuries had left his manger short of options. So a mature player, aware of his own limitations and need to improve would have sucked it up and recognized the experience as being one to learn from. But Barkley isn’t a mature player, he’s a product of an English system that’s told him he’s the next big thing and he’s believed his hype. You can see it in the way he holds on to the ball that little bit too long, the way he often goes for the speculative shot instead of a simple pass. A good manager will clean his game up and improve him as a player, but he needs to dry those eyes and accept that will sometimes mean sitting on the bench.