The Premier League mid-table is tormenting the teams vying for the last two Champions League spots, which is a nice distraction from Liverpool and City’s unimpeded runs.
Hello, and welcome to another edition of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer-football column. We’re a day late this week, but that’s OK. You were thinking about Game of Thrones anyway.
The “race” for Europe
Some extremely surprising news from the Premier League this weekend: Liverpool won! And then — you’ll never guess, not in a million years — Manchester City only went and did the same!
So it’s as you were in the title race: the team that never looks like dropping another point is just ahead of the other team that never looks like dropping another point. Hyped for next week.
In truth, this is a little unfair to the World’s Noisiest League. Ignoring the S-tier for the moment, it was actually an exceptional round of fixtures for silly things happening to big teams. Everybody else in the top six dropped points, as the race for the other two Champions League places heated down.
On Saturday, West Ham became the first visiting team to win at the Please Contact Daniel Levy For Sponsorship Opportunities Stadium, a result that looked quite worrying for Spurs until United and Chelsea fought each other and themselves to a draw, and Leicester stuck three past Arsenal. Nobody wants to finish in the Europa League places, you’d think. But apparently nobody wants to finish anywhere else, either.
It’s like watching Sideshow Bob and the rakes, except every rake is another Sideshow Bob, and they crash into each others faces and go “uuuuhhhhh”. And then both fall over, and wait for a third Sideshow Bob to come and step on them, and then a fourth, until the entire screen is just Sideshow Bob standing on Sideshow Bob, groaning, repeating, around and around, and … ahem. That kind of got out of hand. You take the point though.
Two things are happening here. The first is that all the teams in 3rd through 6th are, on some level, having a bit of an odd time. Even Spurs, with their Champions League semi-final and their shiny new stadium, are scuttering along nervously, hoping that nobody notices the yawning hole where their midfield should be.
Meanwhile Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester United are each having a different flavour of identity crisis. Chelsea aren’t finding Sarriball as fun or as good as was promised, while Arsenal are discovering that The Who might have had a point: “Meet the new boss … oh god, the football’s weird like with the old boss, but we don’t have years of respect and affection to fall back on. Boris the Spider.”
Manchester United’s identity crisis has been sparked by a complete absence of identity, which is a good trick if you can manage it. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s doing his best, of course, but at some point he’s going to realise that the club of Alex Ferguson and Roy Keane is now the club of Ed Woodward and Yanmar Tractors, and his heart will break, and his little face will crumple, and a single solitary tear will roll down his adorable face …
… and then, next season, his broken spirit reforged in the flames of vengeance, he and his team of iron and blood will lay waste to the league. And he will take the trophy in his hands, and snap it over his knee, before walking out of the world forever.
Maybe.
Anyway, the other thing, which is arguably more important than the conniptions of the indolent rich, is that the Premier League has a proper mid-table again. And that does more for the spectacle than any number of recursive Simpsons jokes.
Within that mid-table, Wolves, Leicester, Everton, Watford, and West Ham have been doing excellent work to keep those above them honest. Wolves have been the pick, beating all four Sideshow Bobs over the course of the season, as well as knocking Manchester United out of the FA Cup in rousing style. Turns out that Gestifute know how to pick a footballer.
The rest haven’t been quite as sexy, but they have done their parts as well. Watford have beaten Spurs, West Ham have trounced Manchester United, Everton have turned over Chelsea, and practically everybody’s had a dig at Arsenal. That loss to Leicester was their fourth in five league games, all against residents of the mid-table. And they could easily have lost against ten-man Watford as well.
It’s probably worth taking a moment to acknowledge Everton in their own right: darling, broken, strange, inexplicable Everton. Almost always there, always never quite there. Is there another team in English football that could make such a nonsensical sandwich as beating Arsenal, then losing to Fulham, then thrashing Manchester United? And make it seem so natural, and almost inevitable? There is not, for that is what Everton are for. A danger to everybody, most of all themselves.
This is all tremendous, obviously. A strong and dangerous mid-table matched with a handful of interestingly imperfect strong teams keeps the whole league fizzing along nicely. It gives us set-piece games outside the internal battles of the big six or the relegation scrap, and it means that there are questions every weekend. Questions to which we don’t already know the answers.
It is, in fact, exactly how a football league should function, and exactly how the Premier League has always pretended to function. Anyone can beat anyone, so the boast goes, and while tiers are inevitable, each should be able to inconvenience the next.
So if we pretend that this is an 18-team league with a four-way title race that the mid-table keeps rudely interfering with, then we’re almost there. Just a shame about the two invulnerable supergods hovering above it. Ah well. Bring on the European Super-League, send them on their way, and embrace the chaos.
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