The Weekend: 14th August 2023

Burnley are back, Spurs aren't a calamity, and Tom Brady gives me the creeps.

With some booing of players taking the knee, a cigarette lighter being thrown at an opposing player, and a supporter getting on the pitch and trying d to make a move toward another opposing player before being wrestled to the ground, so they returned to the Premier League. Burnley are back, baby.

Manchester City won 3-0. Erling Haaland scored. From their perspective, it was almost as though the summer break hadn’t really happened, but that wasn’t really the main topic of conversation after the final whistle blew. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what could possibly be going on in the minds of anybody who sees their team get promoted, quite probably spends hundreds of pounds on a season ticket, and then gets themselves banned, likely for life, on the opening day of the season.

One for The Atlantic, there.

*sideways glance to camera*

There was some consternation at The Emirates Stadium on Saturday lunchtime when the live televised match between Arsenal and Nottingham Forest had to be delayed by half an hour on account of the ticketing system malfunctioning, leading to nervous sweating over whether, combined with the current trend for adding a quarter of a half onto the end of each half, the 2.45 curfew might be broken.

But Mikel Arteta didn’t turn into a pumpkin, though his team did have to work slightly harder than they might have expected for a 2-1 win after having run up quite a comfortable first half advantage. An injury to Jurrien Timber was a concern, but the latest from the grapevine is that it’s unlikely to be serious.

Luton were given a stern reminder of how difficult this season is going to be with a 4-1 defeat at Brighton, who served a timely reminder that they may now have a depth of talent robust enough to withstand the loss of key players. There was booooooooo-in’ aplenty at Goodison Park as the new season started with a 1-0 home defeat against Fulham, though this defeat was more of the ‘couldn’t buy a goal’ variety than the ‘pass me that effigy of Bill Kenwright and give me your lighter before you do something really daft’ variety. Alexandar Mitrovic sat on the substitutes’ bench, glowering, for almost an hour. Everton look like they might be set for a third straight year of circling the drain.

The other 3.00s finished with Bournemouth and West Ham drawing, which hardly felt like a coupon-busting result, and Crystal Palace winning 1-0 at Sheffield United, and the evening match saw Newcastle beat Aston Villa 5-1, an evening somewhat overshadowed by a horrible injury to Tyrone Mings, the sort where you can see from the way he goes down and his immediate reaction that it is serious.

Sunday afternoon saw the Spurs clown car roll across London to Brentford. The headspace of the Tottenham Hotspur supporters is a very strange place at the moment. It feels a little like what it might be like to be The Mayor of Halloween Town. On the one hand, there remains a sense of incandescence at the way in which the club soiled itself publicly yet again over that matter, dropping ball after ball after ball going back five years, resulting in a supremely talented player leaving the club because he kinda had to.

But on the other, the Bandit energy of Ange Postecoglou, a manager who says publicly that the supporters are really important rather than criticising the fans of a club who haven’t won the league since before the Beatles had their first number one for ‘lacking patience’ in a team that was both boring and starting to fall down the league table, as though he had nothing whatsoever to do with it, has lifted supporters, and this energy does seem to have transferred to the team.

Familiar asterisks remain. They need a better goalkeeper than Vicario. The centre of the defence needs shoring up. And there were few signs that Richarlison has yet emerged from the cloud under which he spent so much of last season. Son coughed and sputtered a little. But there were also—and this gives a good indication of how the latter stages of last season felt at Spurs, which is saying something—reasons for cautious optimism.

That James Maddison wasn’t chased down by other clubs during the summer was something of a mystery, but his excellent performance was exactly what you needed in a team shorn of its highest-profile player. Yves Bissouma put in a shift which served as a timely reminder of why they paid Brighton so much money for him in the first place. Good to see a player of his talent finally being coached. And Emerson Royale, a player who you just kind of want to see succeed, scored a superb goal. It was a flawed team performance, but it was also nice to come away from the game with the feeling that there were people on the pitch, on the touchline and in the stands who wanted to be there.

Chelsea and Liverpool drew 1-1. Either might have won it, which was somewhat ironic, considering that there was a brief point at which Liverpool were 2-0 up during the first half before we all had to sit around our fingers for a couple of minutes before the robotic joy sponge chalked it off. I get it. Yes, yes, yes. Either you are offside or you aren’t. But they’re drawing pretend lines on the pitch with computers and zooming in on it and…

I’m not the only person seeing this, am I? I don’t want to sound like a stuck record on this, but every time—every single time—one of these gets flagged nowadays, my first thought is, “What is the purpose of this rule?”, because the irony is that if, rather than zooming their lenses in closer and closer and started drawing them back a little, they might start to see how ridiculous it all looks.

Liverpool started the better team, Chelsea finished the better team. Both teams still need work, and that definition of ‘work’ means ‘coaching, getting to know and understand each other and new systems, and becoming familiar with the way things are going to work’ rather than ‘continuing to throw money around like confetti with little actual thought being given to, yanno, actually assembling a squad’.

The EFL

Not being a fan of American football or really terrible politics, Tom Brady is a cultural phenomenon who has largely passed me by, but I am aware of the existence of the New England Patriots, I know what a quarterback is, and I know that his involvement at Birmingham City is A Big Deal.

In his post-match interview with ITV following his new club’s 1-0 win against Leeds United, I was most struck by how very odd he is, in particular his speech patterns, which made the interview feel as though while ITV had paid for the gold package, which entitled them to be in his presence, they hadn’t paid for the platinum one, meaning that his words were instead generated by AI rather than by him actually speaking.

Quite what a man who almost certainly owns a gold staircase made of St Andrews in its current condition is just about anybody’s guess, but Birmingham won 1-0 with a late penalty and presumably quarterback game recognise game, so at least he had a satisfactory end to his afternoon in the West Midlands. St Andrews is due to be fully operational again by November. About time, too. But ultimately… what a profoundly odd man Tom Brady is.

Leeds United, meanwhile, continue to stumble through the early stages of the season. Manager Daniel Farke seemed to give the game away somewhat in his post-match interview, shutting down references to both Wilfried Gnonto and Luis Sinisterra, neither of whom were present for the trip to Birmingham and neither of who were injured, either. “We’ve got our Leeds back”, some may have thought, wearily.

It was a mixed weekend for the Championship’s newly-relegateds. Southampton had one of those afternoons where up becomes down, black becomes white, and you somehow end up drawing 4-4 with Norwich City, a result which everybody present knew had just happened without being able to fully explain how. Leicester City, meanwhile, won 1-0 at Huddersfield Town. The Warnock Effect hasn’t yet had the same effect on Huddersfield as it

In true Championship style, Leicester’s win means that, with just two league matches of the season having been played, already only two teams are left with 100% records in the division. The other are newly-promoted Ipswich Town, who beat Stoke City 2-0 in front of 29,000 at Portman Road. They top what passes for the league table at this point of the season. At the risk of sounding like my dad, newspapers used to not even publish them until the first three matches of the season had been played. Just sayin’.

Coventry City lost Gustavo Hamer to Sheffield United last week and they lost to Leicester last weekend, but if those were difficult blows to take so early in the new season they didn’t show many signs of letting this derail them in brushing Middlesbrough aside 3-0 on Saturday, and there was a similarly impressive result for Hull City, 4-2 winners against Sheffield Wednesday. You may wish to keep an eye on the progress of Hull’s head coach Liam Rosenior, this season. He’s got that team playing some very good football indeed at the moment.

If ever a match had the whiff of an extremely early relegation six-pointer, it was Cardiff City vs Queens Park Rangers. Both teams are expected to struggle this season, and on the opening weekend Cardiff conceded a stoppage-equaliser to draw at Leeds while QPR conceded four times in the first half at Watford. Well, it’s QPR who have their season up and running, with a goal from Kenneth Paal midway through the second half securing them a 2-1 win at The Cardiff City Stadium.

If you wanted to demonstrate something fundamental about the state of football in England below the Premier League in 2023, you could do worse than show them the current League One table, in which the team at the bottom has won both of its matches. Wigan’s 2-1 win against Northampton moved them onto -2 points. If that -8 point deduction from the EFL was intended as a punishment for this season, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be much of one for long.

Wigan’s previous financial issues—already a thing of the past, of course, thanks to new ownership—are letting others off the hook. Six other teams have failed to pick up a single point from their opening two matches, while at the other end of the table four clubs—Bolton Wanderers, Cambridge United, Stevenage and Peterborough United—have all won their first two, with none of them yet having conceded a goal.

League Two has a slightly unlikely look after a couple of games. Wrexham’s bumpy start to the season continued with a 1-1 draw at Wimbledon, a match in which we got to witness the advantage of having the largesse to be able to sign a Premier League goalkeeper when they have to face a penalty kick against a League Two opponent. Ben Foster saved a penalty but then conceded a second one. They have one point from two games.

They’re not the only team who are finding that HMS Piss This Tinpot League might not be as stable a vessel as they’d believed it might be before a ball was kicked. Stockport County have lost both of their opening matches when they were the pre-season favourites to life the title, while bottom of the entire 92 sit Doncaster Rovers, which feels like surprise.

Arguably the surprise team at the other end of the table, one of just three with six points from their first two games, is Barrow, who struggled in their first couple of seasons after getting back into the League in 2020, but who finished ninth last season and whose start this time around indicates that they may not be finished with their upward trajectory just yet.

Non-League

It was the first weekend of the season in the step three and four divisions—the Isthmian, Northern Premier and Southern Leagues, in old money—and crowds were fairly healthy, with each of their premier divisions recording an attendance well in excess of a thousand. It’s easy to forget, but it is worth remembering that these divisions are as far removed from the National League as League One is from the Premier League.

There’s certainly a surprising face at the top of the National League in the form of Southend United, who’ve won their first two league games of the season without conceding a goal despite the fact that there remains a possibility that they may not exist by the end of this month. Their 2-0 win at Dagenham drew a crowd of more than 3,000 and served as a reminder that Southend only finished just shy of the promotion places last season. If Southend can get their act together off the pitch, the team looks good. But we all already know that things aren’t quite as straightforward as that.

A couple of former EFL teams who had rough starts to their seasons had a couple of hours respite on Saturday. Oldham Athletic lost their opening match 4-0 at Southend but bounced back with a 5-1 win against Aldershot Town while Rochdale, who lost their opening match at home to the newly-promoted Ebbsfleet United, bounced back with a 1-0 win at Oxford City. Well, ‘bounced’ might be a slight over-exaggeration, given that it was a narrow win decided by a second half goal against pre-season favourites to be relegated from the division.

At step two, only one team in the National League North has six points from their opening two games of the season, so congratulations to Blyth Spartans, 2-0 winners at Warrington Town and the only team in any of the top six tiers from the Premier League down to be clear by points at the top of their league table. STOP THE COUNT, and all that.

In the National League South, meanwhile, the agony of Torquay United doesn’t seem to have evaporated with the coming of the new season. Following relegation from the National League at the end of last season, they started this season with a 2-2 draw at Dover Athletic, a result which doesn’t sound too bad until we recall that Dover only avoided relegation by two goals on goal difference from this division last season. They followed this up by losing 3-0 at home to Worthing on Saturday, a defeat which put their opponents top of the table and left them in 20th place in the table. League tables may be kind of useless at this very early point in the season, but that doesn’t mean they’re not depressing, should you happen to be stuck near the bottom of one.