Honesty is always the best policy, well most of the time. So to my regular readers (of which there are some) I need to throw out a disclaimer for this week’s column. I’ve not watched any football since Saturday’s ‘Match Of The Day’ so whether this becomes the football article without any mention of the game itself I am not sure, but buckle up as I have just as much an idea as you do as to where this will all end – termination of employment notwithstanding.
We may well as start with Saturday and the fact that Tottenham cannot buy a win at the moment, maybe that has been the reason for my football turbo sulk as of late. I even had a paid up ticket for their midweek win over APOEL and still refused to go. The bounciest of dead rubbers after four games without a domestic win was going to do little in the way of tempt me to traipse across London in what is seeming to be a bleak mid winter for Mauricio Pochettino’s men.
However before I get criticism of “your not a real fan” and “give soldiers footballers wages” – actually I’m not sure the latter is a still thing. I am aiming to rectify my footballing sins and give my full support to the troops sorry players this afternoon (Saturday) as Spurs play host to Stoke at Wembley and if they don’t win this one then football can well and truly go in the bin.
Last Saturday evening saw without question the game of the season, a mantle it will hopefully hold on until Sunday when the Manchester derby is the first ever encounter to have no fewer than 73 goals scored in one game, anything less and the level of hype that Sky have poured into this hyper-galactic mega Sunday will only have fallen short in the eyes of the armchair fan.
Before I get to distracted by the point I was making by going out of position like a South American number 10 who just won’t track back and do his defensive duties, surely the ‘fixture computer’ has been nobbled after spitting out both Manchester and Merseyside derbies on the same weekend.
I think someone has been staying late and playing about with the spreadsheets that host the fixtures, which can only add credence to the notion that you should ALWAYS password protect Excel files. Trust me as Data Analyst (you would probably would have guessed I’m not a professional writer by now) I have learned this the hard way.
But anyway where were we? Ah yes the Emirates, well I wasn’t I was at home in the kind of mood post-Tottenham that if I had a Cat I would have booted it across the front room but what a game it was for the neutral. Only I’m not a neutral because I hate Arsenal.
The game was nothing short of stupendous, how David De Gea can face 33 shots and only concede a goal which in itself was bordering on lunacy by the fact that Aaron Ramsay knocked back to Alexandre Lacazette instead of shooting himself defies any real logic.
I bet Manchester United will be thanking their fax machine for that performance as if that was fully functional ‘Savey Davey’ as I once called him would have been doing that against the likes of Malaga and Getafe in a Real Madrid shirt instead of the Gunners.
It was a breathless game which if you are asthmatic would leave you reaching for your inhaler by the end, when tactics go out the window like what we saw last weekend it is hard to say who really had a good game and who didn’t because the plans simply go out the window.
David De Gea obviously earns all the plaudits for his incredible efforts between the sticks while Jesse Lingard just has people scratching their heads, not because of who he plays but for how he celebrates. If he did that nonsense in a World Cup Final I’d probably turn my TV off in disgust.
Quite simply it was a game that bordered on the farcical and I’m not just talking about Arsenals’s defending early on either. So there you have it a football column which proves you don’t have to watch a lot of football to write a column about football (but long term it would help)
Oh and some things happened in midweek that I am sure you can read elsewhere on the website.
Until next week (no cats were booted in the creation of this column)