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Crystal Palace won the damn Community Shield. Liverpool, all that firepower, and they weren’t a match for Sir Glasner and his exciting squad of players.
Hard to put any sort of deep analysis into these games, the Community Shield has rarely been an indicator of success. If you win it, it’s a trophy. If you lose, you never liked that nonsense anyway.
But… you came for hot opinions you could weaponize against me at a later date… so here’s mine.
Liverpool have underinvested to a deeply unserious level this season. They have Konaté with one year left on his deal and Madrid are there, at the end of the contract rainbow, with a fat old deal. Virgil van Dijk is now 34 years old and still their most important defender. He played all the minutes last year and I have a feeling he might not have another season like that for the rest of his life. Liverpool are looking light if he gets injured. Joe Gomez and Rhys Williams for 20 games. Not sure about it. Also, how funny was it to see them get out-xG’d after spending 100 billion on attackers this window? Virgil was told Liverpool have ‘so many attacking options’ and his response was ‘do we?’
We’ve had a summer not having to think about PGMOL, but the hope was the Premier League would be thinking about them and we’d see some reforms.
And we got them…
Now, if a keeper holds onto the ball for more than 8 seconds, it’s a corner.
You heard me right…
There’s a comedy show in the UK called _The Fast Show_. An old farmer would be sent out by his wife to get some cabbage, he’d come back, she’d ask whether he got the cabbage and he’d say…
“Even better than that, I picked up 2 golf balls, a live chicken, and a screwdriver.”
That’s how I feel about these new PGMOL reforms. The mission this summer was very simple. Get to a better collection of referees, be public that it wasn’t good enough last year, and reassure fans they’d not have to think about refs this season.
What did we get? The worst rule I’ve ever heard that will be activated once to the disadvantage of Arsenal, then never again.
The lack of seriousness the Premier League puts on the most toxic part of the game is quite simply astonishing. It’s like there’s a belief that the rage is good for the ratings, or it’s not serious because it’s just the online thugs that complain about it.
RATINGS DIPPED 10% LAST YEAR, LADS. A large chunk of the reason the league wasn’t competitive was… REFEREES. Shouldn’t every club in the league be forcing the issue… what did you do this summer to ensure fans aren’t spitting feathers at garbage decisions all season long?
Turns out… nothing. They couldn’t even get past the Community Shield. Mac Allister clearly handled in the area, VAR could see the handling, but they didn’t give Palace a VERY clear penalty. I can’t be watching Saliba get done at Chelsea, but Liverpool get off for something so clear and obvious. We all know Liverpool get favorable decisions because someone from PGMOL called Klopp a bad word at an afters. The story is out. Let’s move on and start treating Liverpool like every other club and throw some shocking decisions their way for once.
Man City are just about done shedding a batch of outrageously expensive talent that didn’t work out and they’re ready to put some big dollars into Rodrygo, because why not? The Premier League, heading into year 19 of deliberating on a case that really shouldn’t be that complicated, and the feeling from literally everyone in the world is that if you can’t pin Leicester down to an infraction, how are you going to pin down a club that has every celebrity football finance lawyer in the world on their books?
My view on Rodrygo is that he’s a very expensive opportunity that comes with a lot of potential downside. He’s the perfect Man City player because if he doesn’t work out for them, he’ll be replaced. For Arsenal, if he doesn’t work out, like most €100m signings, then we’re in a mess with a player who Carlo said wasn’t motivated.
Give me Eze. That’s who I want. He completes our summer. That player will take us to the Promised Land. He can play 8, 10, second striker, he could dance out wide to skank us out of deep-block hell. That is our guy and Steve Parish didn’t seem too committed to him staying after the Palace win at Wembley.
We clearly need to sell and there might be some movement there. Zinchenko is attracting disgustingly low bids from Fenerbahçe (£13m) and the same for Trossard, who is apparently attracting a £30m bid. I think both players will return really low fees because 1) Turkish clubs never have big money to spend 2) If you’re being tracked by a Turkish club, it usually means the market has rejected you.
The one I’m watching in the background is Jakub Kiwior, arguably our most saleable asset. He sat on the bench for the whole game at the weekend, which is usually the treatment you reserve for players you don’t want to injure. There must be interest and it must be the good sort… that, or he’s injured himself.
There are some haaaawt rumors doing the rounds that Saliba’s deal is all but done, making him one of the best-paid players at the club. You can’t argue it, he deserves every penny. If we can have him at Arsenal for another 3 seasons, we’ll have blown most people’s expectations out the water, because I think a lot of us thought his treatment by Arteta at the start was quite poor and assumed the shorter deal he signed last time around was related to him wanting to go to Madrid. The player loves it in London, he’s a star in a big team, he wants to win a big trophy with us. What’s not to love?
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