The Weekend: 28th August 2023
The start of the new season has felt... dispiriting, and I don't think it's only me.
It has felt, for much of this first couple of weeks of the Premier League season, as though no-one really wants to be here that much. We hear so many wonderful things about how so and so is going to have a transformative effect upon our team and that this, make no mistake about it whatsoever, is definitely going to be our year. Optimism is unbounded. But then the actual football starts, and it’s been neither as silky nor as smooth as we’ve been allowed to believe it could be.
There is a logical common sense to this. Teams take a while to get up to full fitness, which they can only maximise with competitive game time. New players have to be integrated, and no matter how talented those players are, getting to know the on-pitch habits and foibles of those around you takes time. Summer weather can be uninviting to high octane football. But this season, something does feel different.
August is not even over yet, and you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the Premier League clubs who’ve both had a ‘good’ start to the season and have been winning games. Some of those who have been winning them have been doing so less than convincingly. It just hasn’t got going yet, and while this is a trope familiar to this early point in the football season, it does feel as though we’re all stumbling to life even more slowly than usual, this time around.
Manchester United had to come from two down to overcome Nottingham Forest. Manchester City almost dropped two points at relegation second-favourites Sheffield United. Arsenal were 2-1 up against ten-player Fulham yet still managed to end the game having dropped two points. Brighton got turned over at home. Newcastle were beaten at home by a Liverpool team which came from a goal behind with ten men. It’s all a little bit disjointed.
None of this is to say that everybody is having a miserable time of things. West Ham United have defied some pre-season predictions by sailing to second place with two wins and a draw. They were only a Rodri winner a couple of minutes from time for Manchester City from ending the weekend at the top of the table on goals scored. James Ward-Prowse is lighting up their midfield and the goals are flowing.
Spurs look like a football team again. They won comfortably at Bournemouth with a performance which raised the question of whether they might actually be improved overall, for Harry Kane having left the club. If this is the case, they’re both doing well out of it, as he scored twice on his home league debut for Bayern Munich in a 3-1 win against Augsburg.
Results like those that Spurs have enjoyed since the start of the season have made it easy for him to feel like a diminishing memory, but that’s not to say that Spurs couldn’t do with a new striker by the close of the transfer window. New signings have been made, but the £115m striker hasn’t been replaced, and if the plan is to continue to aim for Richarlison to be the long-term replacement then there’s still work to do, but James Maddison has been an exceptional addition to their midfield and Destiny Udogie is effectively a new signing.
Aston Villa won convincingly at Burnley, a section of whose supporters seem pretty determined to drag the name of their club through the mud by reacting with the maturity of adults who should definitely be taken seriously by lobbing a brick through the window of the Villa team bus as it tried to leave the town. Perhaps a weekend will pass where there is a Burnley home match and you don’t end it by thinking, “Fuck Burnley”, but this was not to be that weekend.
(Sorry, Burnley supporters who don’t act like this and who happen to read this, but you just can’t control the narrative when this sort of thing just keeps on happening. I’m not suggesting it’s on you to fix this and I do acknowledge that it sucks.)
There definitely seems to be a broad feeling of deflation, obligation and unhappiness in the air. The addition of extra minutes haven’t been welcomed by fans. An extra fifteen minutes being added to a match isn’t worth a great deal when they’re added at the end and consequently played at a snail’s pace, with one team still time-wasting because changing this rule was never going to change human nature. Does this damn game have to occupy even more of our time? Is that the only answer they have? More football?
VAR is a failure which cannot be undone. (Well, I mean, it can, but it isn’t going to be.) This failure isn’t in the individual incidents that it’s missed or over-zealous application. Its failure is in shifting the culture of an already entitled and swivel-eyed game even closer to the world of conspiracy theories, of tacitly encouraging everybody to get their electron microscopes out and inspect every incident until they can find the camera angle which most flatters their pe-determined argument and conveniently beneficial to their own best interests.
And even this state of unhappiness could only be reached by killing one of the game’s biggest joys, that brief pause of silence before an explosion of celebration and wild celebration as your team scores a goal. Nowadays, your marking always has to be checked. Everybody has to stand around waiting for a thumbs-up from the Gods, Gods who we don’t even trust any more because, for all that fan conspiracy theories are spiralling out of the control, they still say things like this without giving much apparent thought to how they’ll be interpreted.
The actual laws of the game have been pushed and pulled around to such an extent that it can be difficult to remember what they’re even trying to achieve. Offside is now something akin to a game within a game, and handball is a mess. Everybody on the pitch is in a perpetual state of ready-to-cheat-ness, and everybody in the stands is ready to keep that argument going, sometimes apparently incapable of even accepting that their team might have been beaten by a better team. None of the pundits seem willing or able to hide their club biases any more, either.
Conservative theocracies growing rich off the slow desecration of the planet now lead the wish list of a growing number of supporters, for whom winning trophies—“because I deserrrrrrve them”—is considerably more important than human rights. This has now been proved time and time again, beyond reasonable doubt. The point at which a ‘big’ club simply buys the entire staff of a club which has outperformed them on the pitch doesn’t feel impossible, any more.
Meanwhile abroad, men couldn’t help themselves but pick up the legacy of the 2023 Women’s World Cup and drag it in the direction of a slurry pit at the very moment that it started to come to an end. I mean, they couldn’t even wait until the end of the closing ceremony, and have continued scooting across the carpet on their arsecheeks for a full week afterwards, to a point that it’s still ongoing now.
There’s a time and a place for a thorough dissection of the absolute cesspit that the RFEF seems to have become over the last decade. Suffice to say that, for now at the very least, the revelations to have come out about the way in which this now discredited organisation has been run have seemed to be trying to outdo themselves in a race to the very bottom, to such an extent that you almost find yourself asking how this could possibly have been allowed to propagate and wondering at the fact that there don’t seem to have been any mechanisms to rein them in.
None of this quite feels like the right frame of mind in which to start the week.