MANCHESTER, England - Bruno Fernandes scored twice to put Manchester United into the FA Cup semifinals with a drama-filled 3-1 win over Fulham who had two players and manager Marco Silva sent off on Sunday.
Fulham appeared to be heading for their first FA Cup semifinal appearance since 2002 after Aleksandar Mitrović opened the scoring in the 50th minute.
OLD TRAFFORD STUNNED
The year of Marcus Rashford continued Thursday as the Manchester United forward scored the lone goal against Real Betis at Estadio Benito Villamarín, giving the Red Devils a 5-1 aggregate victory and easy passage to the Europa League quarterfinals.
Before the World Cup, Rashford had a total of eight goals in 19 appearances across all competitions. Since the tournament in Qatar, the 25-year-old has found the back of the net 18 times in 24 games. The total of 26 from 43 is already a career best and the Red Devils are still competing on three fronts.
LONDON - Sam Kerr's superb first-half goal gave Chelsea a 1-0 home win over Manchester United that saw them climb past the Red Devils to the top of the Women's Super League after a tight, tense encounter at Kingsmeadow on Sunday.
Chelsea are now in pole position in the standings on 37 points after 14 of the season's 22 league games, two points ahead of United and with a game in hand. Manchester City are third on 32 points.
When asked to account for how Liverpool went from "the end of an era" to reaching a new epoch in the space of just 90 minutes on Sunday, manager Jürgen Klopp simply said "the main difference is now we have all the players available."
LIVERPOOL, England - Liverpool brought Manchester United's bandwagon to a shuddering halt as Cody Gakpo, Darwin Núñez and Mohamed Salah all scored twice in a record 7-0 hammering of their arch-rivals to boost their Premier League top-four hopes at Anfield on Sunday.
A week after a resurgent United claimed their first trophy since 2017 by winning the League Cup and amid talk of a title push they were blown away either side of halftime as Liverpool recorded their biggest ever margin of victory in the fixture.
Having the World Cup in the middle of the English Premier League season has split the campaign into two chapters. Heading into Matchday 26, The18 created an EPL table that only consists of results since the World Cup break.
The updated table shows how in form some teams are and accurately depicts how poor other teams have performed.
Here’s the table and some of the biggest surprises.
Loris Karius' one-day Redemption Tour is at an end. Playing his first competitive match in nearly two years and his first representing an English club since that infamous night in Kyiv, Karius could not prevent Newcastle's defeat in the EFL Cup final on Sunday as Manchester United scored two goals in a six-minute first-half span to claim the season's first major piece of silverware.
MANCHESTER, England - It was Groundhog Day for Barcelona at Old Trafford on Thursday as Manchester United fought back to earn a 2-1 win that knocked the Spanish side out of the Europa League, leaving the Catalans licking their wounds after another continental failure.
Last season they also ended up in the Europa League playoffs after finishing third in their Champions League group and were knocked out of Europe's second tier competition in the quarterfinals after a 3-2 loss to Eintracht Frankfurt at Camp Nou.
Sunday's EFL Cup final is a tale of two clubs desperate to herald the beginning of a new era with silverware. For Manchester United, ending a six-year wait for a major trophy would affirm Erik ten Hag's revolution. For Newcastle United, a 68-year drought would be remedied by the wealth of the Saudi PIF and the tinkerings of Eddie Howe.
MANCHESTER, England - Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford's superb run of form continued as he netted a goal in each half of his side's 3-0 Premier League win over Leicester City on Sunday to extend his scoring streak to five games.
It was exactly what his side needed as they weathered an early storm from the visitors, with keeper David De Gea pulling off a superb save to deny Harvey Barnes in the eighth minute and topping that with an even better effort to keep out a Kelechi Iheanacho header.