Top Tenner: Instant impacts in Premier League

In his Premier League debut, Chelsea's Nemanja Matic, right, completely locked up Manchester City's Yaya Tour in the Blues' 1-0 win last season at the Etihad.

10. Fabrizio Ravanelli
Not all of the players on this list managed to extend their brilliant starts for very long, burning brightly but briefly. For some of them, their instant brilliance didn't even do their team a huge amount of good in the long run, and it's the latter category that Fabrizio Ravanelli falls into. Ravanelli scored a remarkable hat trick on his debut for Middlesbrough, after making the curious journey from the Champions League final with Juventus to the industrial North-East, and didn't stop there, banging in 31 goals in all competitions in one of the more emphatic debut seasons in English football history. Of course, for all his goals and star power, Ravanelli couldn't stop one of the great nearly seasons, as Boro were relegated by two points, and lost in both the League and FA Cup finals, and the White Feather himself was then sold to Marseille.
9. David Ginola
In 1995, foreign international stars were still pretty exotic. Ruud Gullit had just signed for Chelsea and was busy ambling around the land at half-pace, still being the best player on every pitch by a decent distance, while Middlesbrough completed the frankly implausible signing of Juninho, followed by Ravanelli and Emerson. Ginola arrived from PSG and sashayed straight into the Newcastle team, impressing and indeed dazzling from the get-go, scoring his first goal in his third game and providing cross after cross for Les Ferdinand from the left. Of course, while he fitted right in on the pitch, there were a few 'teething problems' off it, as he explained to the BBC recently: "On my first day in Newcastle I went for a drive around town with my wife and said, 'This is where we are going to live.' I realised what an enormous step I had taken when my wife started crying in my arms in the car."
8. Nemanja Matic
Before Nemanja Matic made his second debut for Chelsea, a little over four years after his first, his signing looked like a textbook Roman Abramovich move. After all, spending 21 million pounds on a player who had been included in the David Luiz transfer a couple of years earlier as a throw-in, a sweetener to help the deal along, didn't seem like an especially prudent move, or one consistent with a club aiming for financial self-sufficiency. Such thoughts basically went out of the window as soon as he started playing, his full league debut coming against Manchester City in which he marked the usually-imperious and destructive Yaya Toure out of what was a largely grim and attritional affair. From then, he slotted into the Chelsea team as if he'd never left, perfectly slotting into a role that Chelsea had basically been trying to fill since Claude Makelele left.

7. Patrik Berger
Conventional wisdom states that it's a bad idea to sign a player on the back of good performances at an international tournament, and of all clubs Liverpool know that, with the likes of El-Hadji Diouf and Salif Diao taking up embarrassing spaces in the list of their previous bad signings. However, it worked out for them with Patrik Berger, part of the Czech Republic side that had only lost that summer's European Championship final after Petr Kouba shovelled Oliver Bierhoff's deflected shot into the net. Berger moved to Anfield in August, made his debut as a substitute that month against Southampton, but it was against Leicester the following week that he announced his arrival, replacing Stan Collymore at halftime and scoring both in a 2-0 win. That earned him a first start, against Chelsea in which he bagged another pair, before rounding off a very satisfactory first month in a Liverpool shirt with another against MyPa in the Cup Winners' Cup. "The feeling out there was just wonderful for me," he said after the Chelsea game. "I just hope this goes on and on."
6. Diego Costa
Seven games, nine goals. As starts to a Premier League career go, it's pretty decent, particularly as there were a few doubts about Costa before he joined Chelsea. He had, after all, been a pretty moderate player until a couple of seasons ago, when he finally flourished for Atletico Madrid, and with the Spaniards the only club he had made any real significant impact at, one wondered whether he would take to new surroundings in England. It's safe to say those fears have been allayed though, to the extent that it now seems difficult to remember how Chelsea operated without him. "Costa has the aspects that you like," Arsene Wenger said recently. "He is focused, always determined and ready for a fight. He has done fantastically well and he is a very efficient player. The timing of his runs and his determination, his killing determination -- you feel he is a killer, he has that in him when in front of goal." And, if you believe Jose Mourinho, he's been doing all of this with a hamstring on the brink of twanging. Imagine what he'll be like when he's fully fit.

Angel di Maria has hit the ground running at Manchester United.

5. Angel di Maria
One shouldn't get too carried away. Some have faded after brilliant starts to their careers in England. It would be foolish to expect him to keep this up. But good lord Angel Di Maria has been exceptional since moving to Manchester United. It's easy to forget that under a year ago, Di Maria was a winger without a home, pushed to one side when Florentino Perez insisted on signing Gareth Bale to take his place. Eventually Carlo Ancelotti found a place for him in central midfield, and he was magnificent, so much so that Atletico boss Diego Simeone declared that Di Maria, rather than Cristiano Ronaldo, was Real Madrid's best player. "He is the one that breaks through the opposition, tilting the balance of the game, and he makes the other players perform better," he said, and these are certainly qualities he has brought to United. He ruthlessly slices and dices opposition defences to his heart's content, improving the team with his own individual excellence and, as Simeone said, by simply making others better. He's quite magnificent to watch, and from a neutral perspective we can only hope he keeps this up for a little while longer yet.
4. Petr Cech
The signing of Petr Cech was one of the final significant acts of Claudio Ranieri's tenure at Chelsea, and while it seemed slightly odd for a team to spend seven million pounds on a goalkeeper when they already had Carlo Cudicini, the Czech was at that point regarded as a back-up for the Italian. However, Cudicini injured an elbow in preseason, giving Cech a chance to impress new boss Jose Mourinho, which he duly did and was named as No.1 for the season opener against Manchester United. He kept a clean sheet that day, and indeed in ten of the following 12 games, conceding just twice before he was eventually given a rest for a League Cup game. Cech would later go on to set a Premier League record of 1,025 minutes without conceding a goal (since broken by Edwin van der Sar) that season, proving that the gamble on a 22-year-old who previously hadn't played for anyone loftier than Rennes had paid off quite handsomely.
3. Arjen Robben
Another of the new intake that summer was Arjen Robben, one of the most -- if not the most -- sought after young talents in the world at that point. Robben almost signed for Manchester United, meeting Sir Alex Ferguson and taking a tour of Old Trafford, but the club couldn't agree terms with PSV Eindhoven, and Chelsea swooped. Robben couldn't make his debut until October of that season after suffering a metatarsal injury in preseason, but when he was fit enough to play, he was an instant sensation, his pace and slaloming runs cutting swathes through Premier League defences. Indeed, it was arguably Robben's introduction into the team that turned Chelsea from a team primarily concerned with defence into one that could thrill in attack, his dynamism not only creating chances for himself but also panic in opposition defences, allowing the likes of Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba, Damien Duff and Eidur Gudjohnssen to run riot.

Arjen Robben nearly signed with Manchester United before arriving to Chelsea during the summer of 2004.

2. Micky Quinn
In 1992 Coventry needed a goalscorer, but it was something of a surprise when Bobby Gould spent 250,000 pounds (not the chump change it is today, kids) on Micky Quinn, a man with a pretty good scoring record to his name but one who had been in and out of the Newcastle team in the old Division One. He had scored seven goals in 20-odd appearances, but fell out with manager Kevin Keegan and Gould acted. This was a hunch, an educated guess based on a feeling that the 30-year-old Quinn, a striker who, shall we say, would not exactly rival Cristiano Ronaldo in a 'best abs' contest, but could recapture some old glories. And boy did he at first, bagging a brace on his debut against Manchester City, going on to score ten in his first six games. "Every time I played I thought I was going to score at that time," Quinn told the Daily Telegraph recently. "Bobby brought in a sports psychologist to help the players and I was invited to take a one-on-one session. He gave me a questionnaire to fill in. At the end of it, he said he'd never met anyone with such a positive outlook." There you have it -- think positive, and you too can be a record Premier League goalscorer.
1. Cesc Fabregas
Like most Arsenal youngsters, Cesc Fabregas made his debut in the League Cup, scoring (a four-yard tap-in) against Wolves in his second game in 2003-04, but despite not playing in the league that season he would make a more significant mark soon enough. Fabregas was a surprise starter in the following season's Community Shield, and made his Premier League debut a week later as Arsenal dismantled Everton to continue their remarkable unbeaten run. And this was all while he was just 17, displaying quite astonishing poise for a boy running around among men -- indeed, he was largely in the side initially because of an injury to Patrick Vieira, bigger and more influential boots to fill one could not imagine. Fabregas filled them though, with some aplomb and he was a first-choice before too long, playing as if he had been there for a decade. There was a case of regret about that season though, from an Arsenal perspective. Fabregas and Vieira played together 24 times, a midfield partnership with skills that complemented each other superbly -- if they had stayed together they could've been dominant, but Vieira left for