Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola (Martin Rickett/PA Wire)

THE PREMIER LEAGUE never ceases to throw up heated debate, talking points, twists and turns, heroes and villains, over the course of nine months and 38 games.

We are already a month into proceedings and it has not disappointed. The Sunday Post aims to bring a snippet of that conversation to you every week from the most watched league in the world in the Premier League Weekly.

Are we all getting a bit too carried away with Pep Guardiola?

NOW may seem an odd time to ask the question in a week in which Manchester City won a Manchester derby at Old Trafford and dismantled German side Borussia Monchengladbach in the Champions League. Seven wins out of seven in all competitions is faultless stuff, but we are only in mid-September.

This time last year, City had won five out of five in the Premier League with many pundits expecting them to romp to the title. But a home loss to West Ham was the start of a long decline which ended with them scraping fourth spot above United on goal difference.

Yes, Guardiola’s City have played some great football so far, but Roberto Mancini and Manuel Pellegrini produced teams that were generally very good to watch, too. Winning at Old Trafford and getting one over Jose Mourinho was certainly a feather in Pep’s cap, but that fixture has been kind to City in recent years with 13 points from their last six visits across the city.

The new players have all made useful contributions so far but the new manager was backed to the tune of more than £150 million in the transfer market, so this is no romantic story of finding cast-offs and turning them into diamonds.

City should be doing great things if they want to be as great as the Abu Dhabi owners demand. At least in the short term, that could mean a long 90 minutes for Bournemouth, the latest visitors to the Etihad Stadium.

Tony Pulis and West Brom: how long can it last?

TONY PULIS and West Brom are an unusual mix. They are currently 12^th in the Premier League. They have finished 13^th and 14^th under Pulis in the last two seasons, and if the manager stays, they will most likely stay up again.

But scratch not far below the surface, and tensions are obvious. Pulis has made it quite clear that the club’s hierarchy did not deliver him the players he wanted in the summer transfer window, given his less than enthusiastic greeting of free transfer, Hal Robson-Kanu. And somehow, Saido Berahino is still at the club, despite making it blatantly clear has wanted to leave virtually since the day Pulis arrived in January 2015.

There are now new Chinese owners at the Hawthorns and it wouldn’t be a major surprise if they wanted a new manager – their own man – in charge. And then there are the supporters. Quite frankly, a great many of them are sick of watching the football, or lack of it, produced by their team. You know what you’ll get with Pulis’ teams and while effective, it is not too pleasing on the eye.

West Brom have already gone out of the League Cup on penalties to Northampton and there are no derbies on the horizon either. All in all, being a Baggie isn’t too exciting at the moment. And a bad result at home to West Ham would only make things a whole lot worse.

Player of the Day: Romelu Lukaku

TOWARDS the end of last season, Romelu Lukaku made it quite clear that he wanted to start this campaign with a Champions League club. There were rumours about Juventus but the Italian Champions went for Gonzalo Higuain for a cool £75 million instead.

The European Championships in the summer further muddied the waters as the Belgian was hit-and-miss over the course of five games, provoking more questions than answers. So fast forward to now and he is still at Everton.

But that was advantageous for the Toffees on Monday night as he helped himself to an 11-minute hat-trick at Sunderland. Manager Ronald Koeman has cut an impressive figure so far in his brief time on Merseyside and Everton look more like themselves again having fallen away so badly in the last few months of Roberto Martinez’s reign.

Could Everton challenge for the Champions League under Koeman’s watch? If the Dutchman sorts out the defence and the midfield, Lukaku should take care of the attack for him. At 23, he is no longer a young player looking for a breakthrough. The striker should be shouldering the responsibility for his club and next up is another North East club in the firing line in Middlesbrough.