Why am I awake?
The soccer day
There’s definitely something to be said for waking up at six on a Sunday morning to watch soccer, but what is it, exactly?
It’s 5:55 a.m. and you are awake, for some reason. Watford are playing Manchester United at Vicarage Road and it’s still dark outside and you don’t support either team. But you are here anyway, so you may as well make the best of it.
The early minutes are always the most enchanting, as the coffee brews and the day, the soccer day, stretches out before you. As the coffee hits, you watch the game intently — you notice everything, you are suddenly Lee Dixon his very self, patron saint of punditry.
The game starts slowly. Neither team looks particularly good or bad. They are just simply playing, and so you wait. You wait for the game to come to you, you think loose thoughts that include words and phrases like “number 6” and “double pivot” and “Wayne Rooney is not a number 10.”
Then the thought occurs to you, somewhere between the 15th and 30th minutes, that perhaps this game is not good. That you are neither enjoying yourself nor supporting your team. You are just simply awake, alone in that early weekend morning way, watching a game for reasons you can’t remember.
You redouble your efforts, push that incendiary thought our of your mind. And you start forming opinions — early morning, inconsequential opinions. Opinions about Paul Pogba (wasted so deep) and Marcus Rashford (good) and Zlatan Ibrahimovic (bored).
But more to the point, opinions about Etienne Capoue and Sebastien Prodl and Jose Holebas. This is the good stuff. This is where you separate yourself from the 9 a.m.-ers and the 11 a.m.-ers, where you learn how to form sentences like, “Sebastien Prodl is really solid, actually — definitely one of the more underrated center-backs in the league.”
You look around and there is no one to tell this to, so you wait, you bide your time, you put this new Sebastian Prodl-related content in your back pocket and move on to maybe some Nordin (who you always thought was Jordan) Amrabat-related content, or a Rooney joke.
Maybe there are some goals, maybe they are even unexpected goals. But goals, even unexpected ones, are not always enough to elevate a game.
The two Robbies appear at half time and express their opinions with such aggressive conviction you wonder what you’ve been missing. Or you wonder whether you could care that much even if they paid you to. Or you tweet something, something like “Watford excellent so far. The Pogba Fellaini double pivot just isn’t working for United. They need a true number 6.”
It’s light now, non-soccer days are beginning all around you, and your couch sitting loses some of its covert charm. The idea comes to you that maybe you should just enjoy the game instead of thinking so much about the things you can tell other people about the game. The idea is dismissed.
The second half chugs along much like the first. United equalize and there is briefly a sense the match has finally arrived, but it turns out it’s only stopping by for a quick hello. As Watford steal the game back, there is the usual buzz that comes from watching a team you dislike lose. But then the ref blows his whistle and the match is over. You think briefly about those early, enchanting, coffee-smelling minutes, and you wonder: why did I wake up for this shit?
And then Stoke start playing Crystal Palace, and you stay exactly where you are.
Relegation theory
The cliché says that no team is too good to go down, and yet 17 teams stay up every season — so.
The truth of that cliché notwithstanding, the relegation battle is shaping up nicely, and two of the current bottom three, Stoke and West Ham, are prototypical too-good-to-downers.
The Potters have finished in the top half the past three seasons and have Marko Arnautovic, Xherdan Shaqiri, Bojan Krkic, Joe Allen, Wilfried Bony and Ryan Shawcross on their team. Those are good Premier League players. And yet they are playing horribly. They conceded four for the second week running on Sunday. Last week it was against Tottenham; this week it was against Crystal Palace, whose defining feature was until recently an inability to score.
West Ham, meanwhile, are left on three points from five games after conceding four to West Brom, whose defining feature is still very emphatically their inability to score. Still, the Hammers have Dimitri Payet and Manuel Lanzini and Mark Noble and Michail Antonio and they finished seventh last season for goodness sake. In their defense, they have a long injury list. But not in their defense, they conceded four goals against West Brom, which is terrible, whichever way you look at it.
Then there are the newly-promoted sides — Hull, Burnley, Middlesbrough — and the recently-promoted sides — Bournemouth, Swansea, West Brom, Crystal Palace — all of whom are scattered between 10th and 17th, and all of whom have looked good or bad mostly depending on how high your expectations of them were to begin with.
And finally, right about where the magic happens, is Sunderland, who have everyone else (except Stoke) exactly where they want them, which is above them in the table. I have a theory about Sunderland: their method for winning the relegation battle is to have the most experience battling relegation, for which it is necessary for them to be in the relegation battle. Thus Sunderland, all too aware of the crushing inevitability of time, choose to be in the relegation battle.
Consider: Sunderland’s current stint in the Premier League is now in its 10th season. In the first nine, they finished 15th,16th, 13th, 10th, 13th, 17th, 14th, 16th and 17th. Over the past three seasons, Sunderland have been in the relegation zone after 62 of their 114 league games.
Their 2015-16 campaign was perhaps the most efficient (at least according to one, possibly incorrect interpretation of the word) piece of relegation avoidance the league has ever seen. The Black Cats spent only seven (seven!) total weeks above 18th place and never rose higher than 17th. It may literally be impossible to do any less and still avoid the drop.
Sunderland do this year after year after year, and what’s more, they’re getting better at it, narrowing the margin of good enough-ness to a hitherto unimaginable degree. They have a new manager and several new players, but this runs much deeper than that.
Other teams are often there or thereabouts. Hull and Burnley have both been relegated in the recent past, but their respective flirtations were brief, and they both closed the deal. They are also both coming off very successful years in the Championship.
Bournemouth knew only good vibes last term, though they finished 16th. Crystal Palace have come close to getting dragged into the dogfight recently, but they’ve always managed to steer just about clear. Swansea have never been in a real Premier League relegation battle. West Ham and Stoke have known only the mid-table in their current runs in the top flight. West Brom have Tony Pulis.
None of these teams, and it will surely be some combination of three of them that goes down, have marinated in the corrosive juices of intense sub-mediocrity like Sunderland. Not for as long, not as intimately. The league table says Sunderland are in 19th place, which is accurate. But history says Sunderland are really in 17th place, biding their time, miserable and mean and too bad to go down.
Weekly Awards
The Frank Vitchard I Did Not See That Coming Award: West Brom
West Brom scored 34 goals last season. That’s 0.9 per game, worse than any other team in the league except Aston Villa, who don’t count, because they were too bad to qualify. Over the first four games of this season, West Brom had scored two goals, which is 0.5 per game, obviously. Then, on Saturday, they beat West Ham 4-2 — the first time they’ve scored four goals since September of 2014.
The Fabio Borini Award for Stupid Red Cards: Adnan Januzaj
Manchester City’s Nolito very nearly won this award for sort of head butting Adam Smith on Saturday, with his team 4-0 up against Bournemouth, and absolutely no one wondering who would win a fight between Nolito and Adam Smith. Anyway, Nolito loses out to Adnan Januzaj for two reasons: (1) Januzaj got sent off for a second yellow, which is always worse because the rush of blood defense isn’t as applicable and (2) Januzaj’s foul on Ben Davies didn’t even approach the sort of aspirational tough guy-ery Nolito was mixed up in. Also, Fabio Borini is Januzaj’s teammate, so it will make handing out the award easier.
The Peugot Award for Kit Clashing: Jon Moss
Jon Moss was the referee for Manchester City’s match against Bournemouth, but you may not have noticed him because he was wearing the Cherries’ kit. Not actually, but close enough to actually to be annoying, which explains why I was annoyed. Still, the Bournemouth players did a good job identifying the ref, unlike Paul Pogba, who at one point during Manchester United’s match against Watford passed the ball straight to referee John Oliver, who was apparently wearing a very reddish shade of black.
The Tony Yeboah Award for Most Ambitious 40 yard volley: Eric Bailly
Manchester United didn’t create many clear cut chances against Watford on Sunday, but there was a period of the game, in the 15 or so minutes after Marcus Rashford equalized, when they looked like they would go on to win the game. This period culminated in a corner for United in the 69th minute. Miguel Britos cleared the initial cross high and very far away from his goal. As the ball dropped, Eric Bailly hit it first time on the volley. It went very high and very wide, but it also went, in a more spiritual way, right into my heart.
The Jonathan Woodgate Award for Terrible Debut II: Jack Wilshere
Jack Wilshere made his first start for Bournemouth on Saturday and he was, to put it simply, not good. Wilshere, who was playing in central midfield for a team that likes to pass the ball, had only 22 touches in 68 minutes on the pitch. He did, in fairness, complete all 10 of his passes, but none of them were dangerous and anyway, 10 passes! He also gave away the free-kick from which Kevin de Bruyne opened the scoring. Wilshere is talented enough that this performance should not be any immediate cause for concern, especially since it came against such a dominant City team. But that doesn’t mean it was good. Yikes.