It was a devil of a weekend, with Arsenal, Chelsea and Newcastle all hitting their opponents for 6. Once upon a time, you wouldn’t have seen a 6-0 scoreline all season, then last season it popped up maybe 4 or 5 times, but 3 times in one weekend? The Premiership has gone completely mad.

Arsenal hit their 6 against new boys Blackpool, the Tangerines floating gently back to earth, just like Skylab. True, they did lose Evatt on 31 mins to a straight red-card but it seems that Blackpool, like a number of clubs in the Premiership are simply not able to go into damage limitation mode. As manager Ian Holloway so eloquently put it: “we went into damage limitation but they [Arsenal] just kept damaging us”.

It was also curious as to why Blackpool felt the need to change their strip? The only thing that their tangerine top clashes with is your mum and dad’s curtains from the 1970s; it certainly wouldn’t have been difficult to distinguish the red from the orange. Surely it’s not just for commercial reasons?

The second 6 was Chelsea, who, of course, have opened up the season with consecutive 6-0 wins, which is quite frankly absurd. What’s more amazing about this win was that they were away, albeit at Wigan, and it was only 1-0 at half-time. In a start that’s full of contradiction the only constants seem to be Chelsea are very very good and Wigan are very very bad.

In fact, Chelsea were so good in this game that, according to the game stats on the BBC website they managed to score 6 goals despite only having 5 attempts on target – now that’s impressive, isn’t it?

Amazingly, Wigan coach Martinez was actually upbeat in the post-match press conference and saw lost of positives in the first half display. Whether he suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or is simply the most optimistic man on the planet is up for debate but perhaps his comments were more for the ears of his chairman rather than the media. Or perhaps he was just pleased to have captain Charles N’Zogbia back in the fold.

Newcastle’s 6-0 hammering of Aston Villa had to be the most bizarre result. The Magpies were well beaten by Manchester United in their opening fixture whilst Villa had been dominant in their comfortable win over West Ham United. Of course they did lose James Milner during the week, the transfer to City finally going through, but that doesn’t explain shipping 6 at St James Park, does it.

Must have been the demoralising blow of John Carew’s horrendous penalty attempt twhen the scores were level.

No doubt it capped off every Villa fan’s weekend to see James Milner setting up Gareth Barry for the first goal in City’s 3-0 win over Liverpool Monday night for a win that was all a little too easy for Roy Hodgson’s liking. Although to be fair to the new Liverpool boss, he felt he had to drop the influential Mascherano who is angling for a move overseas.

Perhaps Blackpool, Aston Villa and Wigan – well perhaps just Blackpool and Villa – can find some solace in the turnaround by Robert Di Matteo’s West Bromich Albion, who, of course, got thumped by Chelsea 6-0 at the Bridge last week but turned it around to beat Sunderland 1-0 at Hawthorns. A rather impressive bounce-back.

Steve Bruce had got Howard Webb up to the Stadium of Light during the week to go over the rules of the game with his players, the Black Cats regularly having the worst disciplinary record in the league and Bruce finally cottoning on that this might be costing them games. Some irony there in that Bruce is constantly berating officials we can only wonder if he thinks that just 2 yellows from this game is an improvement.

Tony Pulis was crossing officials’ names off his Christmas Card list as he felt they missed the ball crossing the line and thus denied his Stoke a late equaliser in the 2-1 home defeat to Spurs. Even Harry conceded that the ball was probably over but that it all worked out okay because the officials had also missed a foul by Huth on Gomez in the build-up to the incident. An away win for Tottenham, 2 goals for hugely impressive Gareth Bale, one an absolute cracker, and actually a pretty impressive result for a Spurs side that lost 5 players to injuries picked up on the plastic pitch in Switzerland, midweek.

Man Utd fell 2 pts and 9 goals behind pacesetters Chelsea by – in Sir Alex Ferguson’s words – dropping silly points in the 2-2 draw at Fulham with Cottager’s Haangeland scoring at the wrong end in the 84th and the right end in the 89th to earn the draw. There may have been a change of manager at Craven Cottage but it doesn’t seem to have affected how Fulham play and the grief they can cause the top sides when playing them at home.

West Ham fans must be wondering much the same – change of manager but the same results despite the same impressive football at times. The West Ham defence conceded 3 again, this time to Bolton and the bottom line is you not going to win many games if leak this many goals. You also have to wonder what this is all doing to Robert Green’s mental state given it was probably already a little fragile after the World Cup and now it’s six goals conceded in the opening two games.

In the other games. Birmingham got off the mark with a 2-1 win over Blackburn, Gardner with a brace there and Everton and Wolves drew 1-1 in a game that Everton really should have won after Tim Cahill gave the toffees the lead.

Still too early to really look at the table, suffice to say that Chelsea and Wigan have consolidated their respective positions.