What We Learned From Football This Season


Man City's jolly wheeze at Man U's expense

Man City show the other cheek to Man U

Less Quality Means More Competition

It was no surprise given the perfect storm of increasing higher rate tax and the demise of the pound that the 2009 – 10 close season saw an exodus of quality players from the Prem. And with the loss of Ronaldo, Alonso and all manner of players whose names ended in ‘o’, including Jermaine Pennant-o, it was no surprise that pretty much all the top teams were weakened. And standards have slipped pretty dramatically. The result was the most competitive Prem for a while, in particular the ‘Race for Fourth’ and England’s poorest performance in the Champions League for years. Aside from Fulham, Man City and Tottingham, I can’t think of any teams who were even noticably better than last year and many, many who were clearly worse. Match of the Day has never been so boring, even with Chelsea’s 5, 7 and 8 nil thrashings of the crap teams.

Arsenal Wenger Needs To Be More Like Bruce Lee, Less Like Chairman Mao

Possibly the most predictable (and depressing) moment in the season was Arsenal’s now-traditional Spring Slump. Having yet again been muscled out of contention in the Prem by a combination of the powerplay of Drogba and the crude assault-tackling of the low grade teams, Arsenal were also comprehensively ‘taught’ a lesson in Wenger’s chosen ‘possession play football’ by Barcelona. Next season Wenger has to show that he can develop a truly multi-faceted approach to football beyond what one might call his ‘touchy feely pretty passing’ game. In this, he needs to adopt a little more of Bruce Lee’s ‘Be Adaptable’ philosophy (as espoused in Enter The Dragon) and a little less of Chairman Mao’s ‘Be Pragmatic in Everything Except Politics’ doctrine. Wenger’s challenge for next year is to move beyond his Maoist midfield jiggery pokery and develop a range of strategies for both beating high class physical teams like Chelsea (suggestion – get a defender who can deal with Drogba) and outplaying the pitter patter of quality ‘press and possess’ teams like Barcelona (suggestion – take a leaf out of Inter’s book). If he can add flexibility to the Arsenal game then we could really see something next year. Otherwise they risk becoming the Holland of club football, the greatest team that never won anything.

Money Can’t Buy You Love (or Anything More Than The Europa League)

Despite spending Lotto Millions of cash on what ultimately seemed like little more than rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, Man City found that paying over the odds for all the not-quite top quality players from the teams in and around them (hello Adabeyor, Toure, Santa Cruz and especially Lescott) and tolerating the lackadasical attitude of useless Brazillian refugee Robinho, neither builds squad cohesion nor actually gets you to the Big Cup. Admittedly, they got it right with the feisty front end of Tevez and Bellamy, who were occasionally simply unplayable, but that wasn’t quite enough. Neither was replacing the relentlessly mid table Hughes with scarf-fetishist Mancini. The latter may have ensured the absolute minimum of European football next season, but clearly bottled it when he played for safe draws at the hard end of the season to ensure the Europa League when he should have gone all out for the Big Cup. Looking long term, this might be a great stepping stone for Man City, and the Europa League is the new Carling Cup after all, but you can’t help thinking that this was the season to leap into the New Big Four rather than stumble along into the European places. As a result, we predict another dose of shopping for stars at Safeways and competing in the Stuggle For Fouth next season rather than moving to the high price deli counter at Waitrose.

Un-Money Can’t Buy You Love (or Even The Europa League)

Football finance is a bit like some bastard form of maths that only the truly mad geniuses among us  (or possibly the criminally stupid) can get their heads around. Despite earning more money than ever from TV rights and ticket sales and merchandise, almost no football clubs actually break even, let alone make profits and there seems to be some kind of mental mathematical block that affects supporters who seem to believe that owners will continue to bankrupt themselves by ‘spashing the cash’ on new players, while reducing season ticket prices. Top of the League in terms of financial fuck-upery and bottom of the League in terms of anything actually important, like points for instance, are plucky in-penury Portsmouth. 58 new owners, none of whom actually seem to have had anything useful to contribute to the club (like, say, money), a squad that has been slowly gutted over time by club gutter ‘appy ‘Arry Redknapp, and a top gate of around 20,000 has seen Pompey amass nearly a trillion pounds of debt (oh OK, more like £100+ million but hey, what’s the difference?), lose the FA Cup Final through a truly pathetic penalty, go into administration and come bottom of the Prem even without the points deduction. Oh and because they couldn’t get it together to fill in the forms correctly, they won’t even be in the Europa League next season. And our money’s on Liverpool following their lead next season.

Can We Cut Out The Crap Tackling

Along with the general deterioration of quality in the Prem, we’ve seen an increase in what you might call agricultural tackling. This stems from a deliberate strategy adopted by less skilled teams to bully skillful players off their game and it’s clear that low grade teams like Stoke, Birmingham, Wolves, Blackburn, Portsmouth are instructed to ‘get stuck in’ and go for hard tackles whether they’re fair or not in an attempt to intimidate and injure quality players. It’s no coincidence that Arsenal have had two players ‘taken out of the game’ for seasons at a time through deliberately crude and brutal tackling (and you could argue that Eduado still hasn’t got back to anything near his true form), or that Ballack will be out of the World Cup thanks to a nice ‘banned for the last decade at least’ tackle from behind. Nor is it a surprise that the players doing this swiftly fade from the Prem to find their proper level lower down the divisions. Maybe the only way to stop this is to ban the tackler for the duration the injured player is ‘taken out’ of the game.

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