Tottenham Hotspur overcame a worrying injury to talismanic striker Harry Kane to beat mid-table Bournemouth 4-1 with a Son Heung-min double and goals from Dele Alli and Serge Aurier to move up to third in the Premier League.
The loss of England international Kane, Tottenham’s top scorer, who went off with an ankle injury on the half-hour, took some of the gloss off a hard-won comeback victory with the visitors slightly flattered by two late goals.
A high-octane Bournemouth start led to Junior Stanislas hitting the bar and then scoring after six minutes but Alli, who had not found the net in 15 games, ended his worst barren spell by equalising from a position usually occupied by Kane.
Alli also played a major part in Spurs’ second goal, crossing for Son to score with a scuffed shot before the South Korean netted his seventh goal in four games from a late breakaway.
Full back Serge Aurier made it 4-1 late on after Bournemouth goalkeeper Asmir Begovic failed to clear his lines.
ARSENAL 3 WATFORD 0
Arsenal eased their way past Watford 3-0 on Sunday, marking their first clean sheet in 12 league matches and settling nerves at the Emirates after a string of losses in 2018.
The win leaves Arsenal 10 points off Champions League qualification in sixth place in the standings, while Watford stay in 10th.
“It was a convincing win. It gets us out of that negative spiral that we were in,” Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger told reporters.
Prior to their midweek 2-0 away win over AC Milan in the Europa League, the Gunners had lost four games in a row in all competitions, including back-to-back 3-0 drubbings by runaway PremierLeague leaders Manchester City.
“In one week we got from hell to heaven,” Wenger said.
Arsenal’s German defender Shkodran Mustafi opened the scoring in the eighth minute, heading home from a Mesut Ozil free kick for his third goal of the season and the home side’s 1,000th of the Premier League era.
Watford pressed Arsenal back into their own area as the first half came to a close, but they were unable to equalise.
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang doubled the lead just short of the hour mark, running onto a pass from former Borussia Dortmund team mate Henrikh Mkhitaryan and rounding the keeper to slot the ball home.
A minute later Watford won a penalty when Ainsley Maitland-Niles was deemed to have brought down Roberto Pereyra in the area.
But Petr Cech got his fingertips to Troy Deeney’s spot kick, nudging the ball onto the post and back out, to roars of approval from the home crowd. The save helped the Czech stopper achieve his 200th clean sheet in the Premier League.
Aubameyang then turned assistant for Mkhitaryan in the 77th minute, passing the ball across the front of the goal for the Armenian to smash the ball home from close range.
“I’m disappointed because I can’t believe today we don’t score a goal. We conceded an early goal and then everything changed,” Watford manager Javi Gracia said at a post-match news conference.
“In the second half we created more chances, but after their second goal it was very difficult for us.”