Ode to awful

From chaos, order

Soccer is beautiful sometimes, and other times, like approximately 10:12-10:40 a.m. CT last Sunday, it is so bad as to make you wonder why you didn’t move to the Alaskan wilderness when you had the chance.

The entire first half of West Ham’s match match against Southampton on Sunday was bad, but the middle half hour of the first half of West Ham’s match against Southampton on Sunday was exceptionally bad, perhaps the most pristinely awful 28 minutes of soccer I have ever seen.

From the 12th minute to the 40th, there were zero attempts on goal. Not even a one. That’s zero shots in 28 minutes, which is a very long time without a shot, for a lot of reasons. Like that shooting is typically how you score, and scoring is typically how you win. And that players often simply get bored when nothing happens for long enough. And when players — especially talented attacking players like Dimitri Payet and Nathan Redmond and Dusan Tadic and Charlie Austin and Manuel Lanzini — when players like that get bored, they shoot.

I checked every other Premier League game this weekend, and the second longest stretch without a shot was 17 minutes, in Burnley’s 2-0 win over Watford, in which their were five fewer total shots. That’s by no means a scientific analysis, but the point stands: 28 minutes without a single shot, from either team, on or off target, is remarkable.

In the same period, from the 12th to the 40th minute, there were only four tackles. There were no yellow cards. One dribble was attempted. West Ham completed 70 percent of their passes; Southampton 80 percent. The two teams were literally taking turns doing nothing with the ball. It was soccer’s equivalent of a black hole.

West Ham’s new London Stadium certainly didn’t help. There’s a sort of hollowness to the atmosphere, something muted. The distance from the stands to the pitch is vast, and in that space something is lost, something that at Upton Park may have elevated this game to a more run-of-the-mill level of snoozery. Of course we really can’t understate how much like death the Hammers played.

At one point in the middle of The Darkness, Jim Beglin said, in a detached sort of voice, “… up to now I’ve got to admit it’s not been a great example of the Premier League.” Someone added that it was more like “Stupor Sunday than Super Sunday,” which is the sort of terrible word play only a terrible game can illicit.

In the middle of all this, Jon Champion offered one one of those baffling, throwaway metaphors of his. If the Arsenal-Chelsea match (more on which below) was a classic oil painting, then this was something closer to abstract art, which as a way to tell us we were watching a shit game seemed both amazingly indirect (for comparison, see: Beglin, 2016) and almost certainly a misrepresentation of both artistic movements.

The real kicker is that he turned out to be, amazingly (I am really, truly amazed by this), right. In a game lacking all sense of direction and purpose, where every pass seemed more meaningless than the last, a game hurtling towards some sort of artistic abyss, Southampton finally, mercifully strung three intelligent passes together.

Steven Davis found Tadic making a run between West Ham’s center-back and right back. Tadic found an underlapping Ryan Bertrand, who cut the ball back to Charlie Austin, who scored with the game’s first shot in 28 minutes. And suddenly everything made sense again.

There’s probably a lesson here, about maybe how hard it is to do the simple things, or how fine the line is between the beautiful game and, you know, whatever the hell this game was. Or maybe it’s more straightforward than that. As Wassily Kandinsky may in a different life have said, everything starts from a shot.

From order, chaos

Arsenal’s first-half performance against Chelsea Saturday was, for the vast majority, stunning. This was Arsene Wenger’s side at their very, very best. Positionally fluid, decisive on the ball, passing and moving at a speed that is almost impossible to defend. Certainly Chelsea were forgiving opponents, but few teams could have kept Arsenal quiet in those first 45 minutes. However, nestled in among all the beauty was possibly the worst passage of play we’ve seen all year, including the symphony of ineptitude at London Stadium.

Witness:

https://twitter.com/talkingbaws/status/779728363443347456

Some numbers from the play:

14 total touches
8 headers
7 players involved
5 possession changes
1 injury
0 completed passes
0 shots
0 tackles
0 announcer references to abstract art

There’s a lot to digest here. First of all there is Hector Bellerin’s decision to loft a long diagonal in the general direction of Shkodran Mustafi, a strange choice with Arsenal leading the game 2-0 and Chelsea in a relatively solid defensive shape. Given how far away from goal Mustafi is, and the fact he’s surrounded by three defenders, it’s unlikely he can do much even with a perfect pass. The pass is not perfect, however, and thus begins the madness.

My favorite part about these 20 seconds is that only one player, N’Golo Kante, takes more than one consecutive touch the entire time. It’s such efficient incompetence. There are at least two separate moments when it seems as if this directionless passage of head tennis is going to end.

First, when the ball finally drops to Kante’s feet. But his pass is cut off by a Bellerin header. Then again when David Luiz beats Alex Iwobi to that Bellerin header. But he kicks the ball into the back of his teammate, Nemanja Matic, and the pinball resumes. It’s like a goalmouth scramble on the halfway line. Delicious stuff.

Then there’s the fact Francis Coquelin is injured for the entire passage of play, and is just sitting on the floor, watching the drama unfold around him. And the way the ball slowly but surely moves toward him, as if to give the referee an excuse, any excuse, to end the madness.

In the end Michael Oliver does decide to blow his whistle, ostensibly so Coquelin can receive treatment — except Coquelin is not suffering from a head injury, or anything else particularly gruesome (he’s sitting up, not in any serious pain) so Oliver has no real reason for doing this, except for that if he doesn’t, this passage of play may never end.

And finally, the pièce de résistance: Theo Walcott’s decision, at about the same time as Oliver is blowing his whistle, to kick the ball as far and high as he can for literally no reason. I like to think of this as a kind of celebration, an homage, if you will, to the preceding 20 seconds. I like even more to think that Walcott didn’t realize Oliver was blowing his whistle, and this was the actual decision he made about what to do in that moment. Coquelin was eventually subbed off and Arsenal continued to dominate with the same irresistible soccer that allowed them to take a 2-0 lead in the first place.

But in some alternate universe Oliver doesn’t blow his whistle, and this passage of play is still going on, beautiful and grotesque all at the same time.

Weekly Awards

The Ragnar Klavan Award For Under The Radar Player Transfer: Alvaro Arbeloa

Alvaro Arbeloa, formerly of Liverpool and Real Madrid, now plays for the Hammers. The 33-year-old is a solid full back, and he will presumably be of use to a team ravaged by injuries. He started at left back on Sunday in place of Aaron Cresswell, who’s out for several months with a knee injury. Arbeloa didn’t play well, exactly, but then it’s hard to blame the left back for what was a pretty terrible overall team performance. He did, however, catch the eye late in the second half, as West Ham’s players became increasingly agitated with Jon Moss, whose refereeing became so exacerbating Arbeloa was forced at one point to place a very tender hand on his lower back. Welcome back, Alvaro.

The Yaya Toure Award For Underappreciation: Salomon Rondon

Salomon Rondon has three goals and an assist in six games so far this season for West Brom, a team that is not, shall we say, blessed in terms of their attacking options. After an uncharacteristic scoring outburst against West Ham last week, the Baggies were back to their usual, uninspiring selves against Stoke. Trailing 1-0 heading into second-half stoppage time, and having recorded only two shots on target all game, Rondon popped up with the equalizer, a flicked, front-post header off a corner. There are many, serious problems with West Brom’s attack (or, put another way, Tony Pulis doesn’t care about West Brom’s attack), but Rondon is excellent. He could probably do better, frankly, but in such a bland team it’s easy to forget how good he is.

The Brendan Rodgers Award For Terrible Set Piece Defending: Leicester

Leicester’s exploits last season have made it strangely difficult to criticize them this time around. Still, their set piece defending against Manchester United on Saturday was laughable. United scored four first-half goals against the Foxes; three of them came off set pieces. Two of those — Chris Smalling’s and Paul Pogba’s — were relatively straightforward cases of lazy marking, while the third, Marcus Rashford’s, was exceptionally dumb from everyone involved. Perhaps the confusion at the back was a result of Kasper Schmeichel’s continued absence due to injury. Or perhaps Leicester’s players just don’t care anymore, which as an approach to being a professional athlete is also strangely difficult to criticize.

The Carlton Cole Award For Saddest Bubble Machine: The London Stadium Bubble Machine

Early in the second half at London Stadium, after the half-time rendition “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” had finished, Southampton won a throw-in. As the pitch-level camera zoomed in to show us Cedric Soares taking the throw, it also inadvertently caught a glimpse of the London Stadium bubble machine behind him, a non-descript black box spouting the saddest bubbles you have ever seen. These did not rise up triumphantly into the East London sky, but instead tumbled limply to ground over the edges of the black box from whence they came, like the worst volcano you have ever seen.

The Nick Culkin Award For Least Informative Premier League Debut: Loris Karius

Loris Karius’s arrival at Liverpool was met with great enthusiasm by the Reds faithful, frustrated and often angry as they were (and are) with the consistently unconvincing, but only sporadically incompetent Simon Mignolet. Karius — young, German, handsome, confident — seemed primed to erase all keeper-related doubt at Anfield. Then, the week before the season started, he broke his hand, and Mignolet retained his spot in goal. On Saturday, Karius finally made his league debut, and had absolutely nothing to do as the Reds thrashed Hull (this only four days after he had absolutely nothing to do in his League Cup debut against Derby). Hull managed two shots in total. One was off target and the other was a goal, for which Karius was in no way at fault. So, yeah, Karius. Maybe he’s good. Maybe he’s not. If Liverpool got to play Hull every week, we may never find out.