Can you hear those low, colossal thuds in the distance? Do you feel the skies darken and the air grow thick with primal fear? Can you feel that deep roar in the bowels of the earth, that howling wind in the trees, that resounding Dudley brogue thundering in the clouds above?
Of course you can, because…
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Big Sam’s Back in Business
Of all the things that will happen this season, nothing will be better than the return of Sam Allardyce. He is a true legend of the Premier League, a giant of the English game. While puny interlopers like Marco Silva and David Wagner are acclaimed for their technically superior football, Big Sam laughs at their pathetic weakness, for he knows they are only ever a five-game winless streak away from handing over their jobs to him. While new, supposedly “progressive” managers are as fleeting as the seasons or the leaves on the trees, Big Sam is eternal: the patron saint of relegation dogfights and the holy saviour of rubbish teams.
Having taken over at Everton in the midweek, Big Sam was given the task of turning around the worst defence in the league and a side which had conceded 28 goals previously. He only needed to watch on from the stands as they beat West Ham 4-0 on Wednesday, his mere aura enough to summon up a dogged rearguard action. Another clean sheet against Huddersfield later, and we’ve reached peak Big Sam already. Forget all this tippy-tappa bollocks that everyone keeps going on about: let’s all pour ourselves a nice pint of wine and raise a toast to the most iconic man ever to have managed in the top tier.
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The Arsenal Experience
If Premier League clubs want to convince fans of anything, it’s that match day is not so much an explosion of tribalism as a bespoke hospitality experience. Arsenal are perhaps the guiltiest club of all in this regard: from the first-class airplane seats of the Emirates to the notorious buffet of the corporate area, the team from roughly 2006 onwards seem to have been an afterthought to extracting money from city workers. More than wasabi peas on the concourse or champagne receptions in the members clubs, “the Arsenal experience” can be summed up perfectly by Saturday’s 3-1 defeat to Manchester United.
Arsenal had 33 shots to United’s eight; they had 75 percent possession at home and played some fantastic attacking football; they completed almost four times the number of passes as their opponents, had 12 times as many corners, and they still managed to lose 3-1 to a side gleefully managed by Jose Mourinho. Like a visual representation of every frustration aired by puce 30-somethings on ArsenalFanTV, David de Gea stood like an enormous monolith in front of the United goalmouth, making a Premier-League-record-equalling 14 saves over the course of the match.
The game was an Arsenal-themed punchline, basically, right down to lovable tween Jesse Lingard doing the Milly Rock on the Emirates touchline. That is the ultimate match day experience at Arsenal right there: being ritualistically humiliated by a kid who holds academic tenure at Dab University.
Emre Can the German… Man
Speaking about how he moulded the character of Alan Partridge back when Norwich’s favourite son was but a humble sports presenter, Steve Coogan told The Guardian in 2015: “I’ve never been particularly interested in sport, but I know that commentators tend to sound very confident and simultaneously slightly stupid. They never stop talking, even if they’re stuck for something to say.”
Case in point: this excellent bit of commentary from Final Score‘s coverage of Brighton vs Liverpool. “Emre Can, the German… man.” Etch those words across the stars, for they truly are the sweetest poetry the human tongue ever spoke.
Dirty Protests
It’s not strictly the Premier League, granted, but something very strange is going on at Sunderland. Namely: according to a number of Sunderland fans, someone did what is variously being described as either “a turd” or “a sitting down piss” in the stands this weekend. Excluding the inevitable “Stadium of Shite” jokes, this a fairly unusual incident, going straight up there with Gary Lineker at Italia ’90 as one of the most famous alleged bowel expulsions in football history. Chronicle Live deserve some sort of award for their coverage of the event: “[Forum] posts say the fan was led away by police. One account published on a Black Cats message board claims a young fan sitting nearby vomited as they were so disgusted by what they had just witnessed.”
The football authorities will no doubt hope such dirty protests stay confined to the Championship. To think, 25 years of glossy Premier League branding could probably be undone by a single shit.
UPDATE 4/12/17: Turns out you can’t believe everything you read on Sunderland fan forums; the man accused of defecating on the stadium seat denied he did such a thing, and – somewhat bizarrely – Northumbria Police backed up his claim, saying in a statement: “A 17-year-old male was arrested on suspicion of being drunk in a sports ground and has been dealt with appropriately. At no point did he defecate on his seat.”
