Man Utd walkers among big disappointments.
Man Utd walkers among big disappointments.
We’ve seen enough of this season now to start making sweeping judgements. Most specifically, sweeping judgements on the biggest f*cking disappointments of the season, safe in the knowledge there is absolutely no chance that any of them make a mockery of this six-game assessment in the mere 32 Premier League games remaining.
Of course, your mileage may vary. A lot of these disappointments you might find not disappointing at all. We’d imagine, for instance, that the collected tears of the nation’s non-Manchester United fans about their troubled start to the season wouldn’t even be enough to start a leak in the Old Trafford roof.
But you know what we’re getting at here. Things that are sh*t, basically. And, specifically, even more sh*t than we expected them to be, if indeed we expected them to be sh*t in the first place. Or indeed, in some cases, if we expected them to happen at all.
Tottenham’s Big-Money Signings Look, nobody expected a clean sweep of smash hits when Spurs decided after years of trying to compete on the cheap to suddenly put on their big-boy transfer pants. It was always likely that at least one or two of their mega-money signings wouldn’t come off.
But we’re now two months into the season and all of them have been some shade of rubbish in a team that still hasn’t won a game and has only just realised that you’re supposed to actually score goals.
They’ve started to have some moments, we can’t deny it. There are hints of quality in some of Spurs’ football, and that’s the first time that’s really been true since the bonkers 10-game honeymoon period for Angeball.
But those hints of quality simply never lead to goals in the early periods of games where they look so tidy in every other way. And there’s no real plausible route to that changing, because Spurs have spent ungodly amounts of money on a large number of attacking players yet ended up with a squad where there is not one single player you’d confidently back to score 10 Premier League goals a season.
We’re also absolutely certain, by the way, that when they do eventually win a game it will come via carelessly wasting a hefty percentage of their meagre goal rations by going 4-0 up after 27 minutes during one of their trademark fast starts.
There will be much talk that something has ‘clicked’ and a corner turned. But it will simply be a statistical anomaly before they go right back to missing eight clear chances in the first 15 minutes, then conceding to the first shot on target they face after three of their defenders fall over and the fourth simply bursts into tears.
READ: 16 Conclusions from Manchester United 1-1 Spurs: Carrick sack, De Zerbi, Fernandes no-show, Savio
Michael Carrick’s Low-Energy Manchester United The bald truth of it is that they are simply not anywhere near a good enough football team to get away with having a head coach who doesn’t really believe in coaching and such.
We’re not saying Manchester United aren’t trying, they obviously are. It’s just that their particular flavour badness does come across that way. They don’t really run much, unless pursuing a wild Rodrigo Bentancur. They don’t really chase things down. They don’t really make things hard for you.
We’re not saying they are definitely worse than Spurs, but it really wouldn’t surprise us at all if the final table ends up saying that. What we do know, though, is that they are bad in a way that looks worse than Spurs.
Spurs are crap, but you can see what they’re trying to do. And how they’re trying to do it. There’s no lack of effort. There are even signs of a plan – even a style bordering on a philosophy – if you squint hard enough.
Man United’s plan, such as it is, appears to be based around becoming an elite walking football team. It’s a bold strategy, but one that seems certain to cost Michael Carrick his job, at which point our disappointment will be compounded when is inevitably replaced by a dreary ‘safe pair of hands’ option such as Eddie Howe rather than a more fun earth-scorcher like Antonio Conte.
Because United will just want a low-risk manager who can raise the floor of their performances rather than gamble on someone genuinely elite but far less safe who might try and smash through the ceiling. Conte would do that. He would try and smash through the ceiling, very possibly by trying to hurl Luke Shaw directly through it.
Bradley Barcola and Liverpool’s Creative Vacuum The good news for Liverpool is that Florian Wirtz is no longer a flop. There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s now played 10 games this season for club and country without registering a single goal or assist.
When you play for Liverpool and France, that’s some effort. Hats off to Bradley Barcola. But he’s far from alone. Liverpool are in the creativity drop zone having fashioned just five Big Chances in their opening six games of the season, and scored just seven goals despite boasting a trio of £100m players among their attacking options.
We’re not saying Liverpool should be grateful to Man City for the distraction, but there’s no doubt that the full ludicrous details of City’s escapades as long as the more conspicuous bed-sh*ttings going on at United and Spurs have allowed Liverpool to thus far rather get away with a drab, soporific and uninspiring start to the season.
READ: How Liverpool exposed Man City but Wirtz and Barcola flopped again
Liverpool fans and the Famous Scouse Wit And that’s just on the pitch. Off it, Liverpool had three weeks to prepare for the visit of Manchester City. A three-week lead time on the banners. Three weeks to workshop the chants. They bottled it.
The promised and expected febrile atmosphere never truly materialised, Liverpool didn’t sound angry, just disappointed. The chants they came up with were workaday and predictable, if to the point. The banners that weren’t just reworked Oasis lyrics deeply uninspired.
This was supposed to be the most hostile and awkward away game imaginable for City to face on their Premier League return. And the most hostile thing they managed was to boo really quite loudly at Nico O’Reilly whenever he took a throw-in. To be fair, he’s very much the primary villain of the piece and always has been.
If this is as bad as it will get for City on their travels this season – and the worst part in many ways is that it almost certainly is – we’re not even sure they’re going to need much of the smirking two-finger siege mentality they appear to have adopted as their cloak and shield for what lies ahead.
Manchester City and the Infinite Sadness But you know what? We get it. We think we understand why Liverpool’s response felt more forlorn than vitriolic. It might have been very different, perhaps, if the verdict had come on the Friday just before the game instead of weeks in advance. The lack of time to prepare might have meant for a more raw and less performative outpouring of emotion.
The weeks that passed between the verdict and the return to action did two things, though. One, allowed the game to be built up and hyped up beyond what it could ever hope to deliver.
But more importantly, we think, for the initial righteous anger at what everyone had long suspected about City being confirmed with £900m knobs to already, even before City so much as played another game, give way to a kind of sadness. Grief, almost, for what’s been lost.
There was plenty of talk on Sunday about how little meaning the actual match hadbecause it, and all City games between now and a settled resolution to the whole affair, is just totally lacking in meaningful context in which it can be placed. Nobody knows if those were three points in the title race, the relegation fight or if those three points will, ultimately, even exist at all.
Yet those feelings of worthlessness are now leaking back through almost two decades of Premier League history. They were never really here. None of it ever really happened. Plenty of the reaction from actual Liverpool fans interviewed before and after Sunday’s game had an air of resigned mourning about it. They hadn’t always come out on top of the rivalry with Man City, but it had been a great and compelling one for several years back there. Glorious failure really can still be glorious, and Liverpool have lost even that.
Liverpool fans weren’t surprised by the verdict, of course, but there’s still a keen sense that something has been taken away from them. It’s not even the titles they would surely have won in the years they pushed City close with absurd points totals for a runner-up, but that the genuine pride that could be felt in that achievement has also now been sullied and tarnished.
City fans – and this is not a criticism, really, because we are confident literally every other fanbase would have reacted the same in their situation – have decided to kind of revel in their villain status.
We remain queasy about just how many of them still unquestioningly support a regime that has been proven to have been systematically cheating the entire game and City fans specifically for so long, but we do understand why those fans have now chosen defiance on the terraces as both a defence and coping mechanism.
But we’re not sure they’re even convincing themselves with the performance. And for everyone else, the keen sense of opportunities stolen and even heroic failure robbed of its sheen.
READ: Man City cheats to be shunned by clubs with ‘more balls than Liverpool’
The Under-the-Radar Flyers We put it to you that there are a number of clubs who’ve made really quite honking starts to the season without anyone really noticing or commenting. One could even add Liverpool to this category as well, if one were so inclined.
Like Liverpool, the main offenders here have some combination of Spurs, United and City to thank for the lack of attention they’re receiving. So distracting are the various shades of crisis enveloping those clubs that even Mr Marinakis has had his attention sufficiently diverted that he hasn’t sacked a manager who’s only managed a solitary win in his first six games.
But Nottingham Forest aren’t the only ones. Sunderland have made a near flawless yet entirely unremarked upon start to their attempt to self-fulfil second-season syndrome into being. Bournemouth haven’t won a game since losing Andoni Iraola to Liverpool and have the division’s joint leakiest defence at this time.
Even Newcastle could, on a different timeline, be facing far greater scrutiny for picking up only two wins and a pair of absolute batterings from an incredibly gentle start to the season, albeit caveats abound for players and manager alike.
The New Managers Nine Premier League clubs began this season with brand new managers, two more with managers appointed this year.
How many of those 11 managers would currently be getting a passing grade? How many are exceeding or even matching reasonable expectation? Enzo Maresca for sure, albeit quite possibly in bleakly futile fashion. Gary O’Neil certainly. Xabi Alonso arguably. Matthias Jaissle maybe.
We’re not at all convinced about the last two names there, but even if we give them the benefit of the doubt it leaves seven with a failing grade at this stage.
Defending Just generally. Defending. It feels like it’s already been a terrible season for defending, with very few honourable exceptions.
There are already nine clubs with double-digits in the goals against column, and that doesn’t include either of the United or Spurs clown-car catastrof*ck backlines that somehow only have nine goals each against their names.
Everton’s Unbeaten Start This one’s not really very fair. There isn’t really such a thing as a bad unbeaten start, at least not for a club who started the season with such an air of resigned ennui as Everton.
But while the 10 points they’ve carefully, painstakingly acquired from two wins and four draws in their opening six games are a further reminder that David Moyes remains one of the most reliable maximisers of limited resources in the game (just don’t whatever you do give him reasonable resources), it just all seems like a social experiment.
Thanks to Man City, everyone is now struggling to feel anything real about this Premier League season. But our sense is that Everton had already got there long before the verdict.
We’ve run it through the supercomputer, and our very scientific findings are that Everton’s season thus far has been 99 per cent drudgery and one per cent that Ainsley Maitland-Niles equaliser against Man United.
And if you think we’re really out of order here, tell us who Everton’s two wins were against without looking it up. That’s right, you can’t.
Fulham Our expectations for you were low but HOLY F*CK.
Steven Gerrard on Arsenal
Steven Gerrard on Arsenal