The Briefing: Would FA Cup salvage season for Guardiola? Glasner’s turnaround; The penalty pros

Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football.

This was the weekend when Marcus Rashford scored his first goals for Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest’s remarkable season continued and Arsenal made their first moves in the summer transfer market.

Here we will discuss whether winning this season’s FA Cup would make Manchester City’s season a success, whether Crystal Palace are having one of football’s weirder seasons and see just how good Forest are at penalties.

Where would winning FA Cup rank among Guardiola’s achievements?

Before Manchester City’s FA Cup quarter-final win over Bournemouth, Pep Guardiola was asked by the TV interviewer if Bournemouth would be extra motivated, because they had never got past this stage of the competition.

Guardiola smiled thinly and replied by saying nobody had ever got to seven semi-finals in a row before, so that was their motivation.

A couple of hours later, after the final whistle, he threw back his head and let out a loud, “WOOOO” into the south-coast air, with the look of a man for whom winning is no longer a given.

City’s record in this competition is extraordinary by everyone else’s standards, but to them, it has become ordinary. In previous seasons, reaching the latter stages has been the bare minimum, even if Guardiola has ‘only’ actually won it twice.

Those two victories have come in trebles — domestic in 2018-19, proper in 2022-23 — meaning it hasn’t been close to their top priority or the most significant achievement of those campaigns, but it’s different this season.

This is now all they have left, along with qualifying for the Champions League, which isn’t a lock. But given how far down the list this competition has been previously, can you call this season a success if they do win it?

Guardiola doesn’t seem to think so. “It would be nice to arrive in the final of the FA Cup and win it, and qualify for the Champions League,” he told the media this week. “I am pretty sure that right now it would be seen as a big success — but the season has been poor and it’s not going to change. Our standards and many things were not good — and that is the reality. So it’s not going to change if we might win one title and we might be happy.”

But he is being too harsh on himself and his players.

This season has been so dreadful for City, their performances so flat and un-City-like, the decline of some key men so alarming and the injury to Rodri so damaging that coming out of it with a trophy cannot be anything other than a huge success. It might even rank among Guardiola’s best achievements — not at the top, obviously, but given the context, it will be up there.

It’s the sort of season that should only end with empty hands and souls to search, but if they come away with a trophy, it will be a little like a 400-metre runner twisting their ankle on the bend but still managing to win a bronze medal.

Guardiola’s standards have been so high for so long that he will regard this season as a failure, no matter what happens. But he should be a little more generous, given the circumstances.

Will Palace’s weird season tempt others to move for Glasner?

This has been a weird season all round in the Premier League. Liverpool are cantering to the title, Manchester City are nowhere, Nottingham Forest have gone from relegation candidates to Champions League probables, every time you think Manchester United can’t get any worse, they get worse.

But maybe the weirdest team of them all has been Crystal Palace.

The start of their season was a disaster. They waited until their ninth game to claim a league win, which equalled their worst start to a Premier League season. At Christmas, they were 16th, with only Wolverhampton Wanderers and the historically bad bottom three keeping them away from the relegation zone. Only three teams had scored fewer goals than them and they looked like they hadn’t recovered from losing Michael Olise, who had joined Bayern Munich in the summer.

Their thrilling form at the back end of last season, and Oliver Glasner’s brilliant work, felt like ancient history.

To say it’s been a different story since would be one of the campaign’s great understatements.

From their last 15 matches in all competitions, they have won 11 (including the last five) and only lost two. In a Premier League table comprised only of results since Christmas Day, they would be third (with one game fewer played than the teams around them). And, after outclassing Fulham on Saturday, they’re in an FA Cup semi-final, where they’ll play Aston Villa, who they’ve already beaten twice this season. They are on a club-record run of six successive away wins, and they have not even conceded a goal away from Selhurst Park since their Carabao Cup quarter-final exit at Arsenal in mid-December.

It could all fizzle out a little from here. They could lose to Villa and if their league form levels out, they’ll probably finish in the bottom half.

But you wonder if this run will be enough for Glasner to attract some attention in the summer. RB Leipzig sacked Marco Rose at the weekend and although Zsolt Low has the job until the end of the season, they don’t have plans beyond that. Glasner will only have a year left on his contract, making him attractive to any club changing managerial direction.

This follows a pattern for Glasner’s teams, with slow starts and impressive finishes being features at Wolfsburg and Eintracht Frankfurt. It will be fascinating to see if that puts off potential suitors.

Palace won’t care. They look like one of the most impressive teams in the country.

Is Nottingham Forest’s penalty shootout success built-in?

The pendulum of the debate over how much skill is involved in a penalty shootout tends to swing one way and then the other.

Some insist it’s a lottery, an argument that seems to be coming back into fashion a little these days, but those in the game tend to think that it is something you can prepare for and be good at.

But is there such a thing as institutional success, when it comes to penalty shootouts? If there is, then Nottingham Forest have it.

In defeating Brighton on Saturday, they became the first team to succeed in three penalty shootouts in a single FA Cup campaign, having previously dispatched Exeter City and Ipswich Town from 12 yards.

But even beyond that, their record in these situations is extraordinary. Since participating in their first, back in 1970 in the Texaco Cup (a relatively short-lived competition that involved selected teams from England, Scotland and Ireland that hadn’t qualified for Europe), Forest have taken part in 20 shootouts, losing just three.

Some of those shootouts were in relatively minor competitions, but over the years, they have won eight in the League Cup, five in the FA Cup and one in the 2023 play-off semi-final. Their defeat to Newcastle United this season in the Carabao Cup was the first competitive shootout they’ve lost since 2006.

Much of the win over Brighton was down to goalkeeper Matz Sels, who has now faced 14 penalties in shootouts this season and saved four, including two at the weekend. But Forest have also taken 14 and only missed one, even more notable against Brighton given their two main takers — Morgan Gibbs-White and Chris Wood — weren’t on the pitch.

Sels does what he does best in shootouts (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

Can you put all of that down to luck? Probably not. Is there actually such a thing as a club being institutionally good at penalty shootouts? Again, probably not. But at the very least, they won’t be scared if the semi-final against Manchester City goes that way.

It might not be the most convincing way of reaching the semi-finals, but this season has been about incredible moments for their fans. Winning in such dramatic fashion has provided several of those.

Coming up

• The FA Cup weekend has been fun, hasn’t it? Well, that’s all done now and we’re back to the serious business of the Premier League this midweek. Tuesday starts us off with Arsenal vs Fulham, Wolves vs West Ham and what could be the game of the week, Nottingham Forest vs Manchester United.
• Then, on Wednesday, the headliner is the Merseyside derby, which should be pretty lively as Everton, much more solid these days, travel to Liverpool. There’s also Southampton’s ongoing quest to not be the worst Premier League team ever as they host Crystal Palace, plus Brighton vs Aston Villa, Newcastle vs Brentford, Bournemouth vs Ipswich Town and Manchester City vs Leicester.
• And one last game on Thursday, which has a little spice to it too: Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur compete for the ‘Gus Poyet Trophy’.
• Friday sees a dash of international football, if you’ve been missing that: the Women’s Nations League. The big one is England vs Belgium, in which Sarina Wiegman’s team could do with a win to boost their chances of making the finals.
• The transfer yarns are already being spun: David Ornstein and James McNicholas report that Arsenal are v v v keen on Viktor Gyokeres.
• Finally, one to keep an eye on but by no means definitively expect: the verdict on Manchester City’s 115-plus charges could drop at any stage. But then again, we’ve been saying that for a while, so your guess is as good as ours.

(Top photos: Getty Images)