October is the cruelest month

Relegation theory, part II

Here we are, nine games into the season and Sunderland are 20th, without a win, on two points. That’s not good.

Not only did they lose this weekend, they lost to a still-jittery West Ham team on a last-minute, left-footed Winston Reid daisy-cutter, the fourth time in nine games they’ve dropped points after conceding in the last 10 minutes. That’s not good at all.

It’s impossible to reasonably predict Sunderland will be relegated, because what Sunderland do is they don’t get relegated, however obviously they deserve to be relegated. But things do not look good right now, and a worrying number of the teams that will need to slip up for the Black Cats to avoid the drop have shown improvement in recent weeks.

But perhaps the biggest concern right now — even bigger than their monumentally depressing weekly attempt at soccer — is that this season it may be much harder than usual for Sunderland to nail their mid-to-late-season managerial switch, which has been their go-to approach to avoiding the drop for almost a decade now.

I have another, competing theory about Sunderland: David Moyes is too good of a manager for Sunderland to have started the season with. The Scotsman comes with a greater pedigree than recent mid-season sackees and his best Everton sides were typically much improved in the second half of the season, both of which facts could well persuade the higher-ups at the Stadium of Light to show more patience to Moyes than they’re used to.

Then again, Moyes has been furrowing his brow so intensely for most of this season (most of the past decade, really) it appears to be only a matter of time before his whole face caves in on itself. Which as facial features go isn’t the most reassuring for a team in crisis.

Anyway, the problem is this: Moyes is exactly the sort of defense-minded, disciplinarian type with which the Sunderland board would probably in another year very much like to replace their failing, attack-minded man-management type. But Moyes can’t replace himself (hopefully), which leaves who?

Sam Allardyces don’t grow on trees (hopefully), and other than the actual, non-tree-grown Allardyce, who is presumably too busy thumbing through his new copy of Entrapment for Dummies to save Sunderland from relegation again, the pickings are very slim. Harry Redknapp? Tim Sherwood? Francesco Guidolin?

That’s a very disturbing list of names.

But Sunderland need to do something. Their two points in nine game so far have them on pace to reclaim the record for lowest ever Premier League points total, a record currently held by Derby, who picked up a completely-terrible-but-at-least-still-double-digits 11 in 2007-8.

If history is any guide, the time to sack Moyes is now. Since getting promoted in 2006-7, the club has fired six managers (Roy Keane and Dick Advocaat technically resigned, but who are we kidding?). Four of them got their marching orders some time from early October to early December. The two exceptions were Gus Poyet and Martin O’Neil (who both went in March). The clock is ticking if Sunderland want to make the most of the momentum hiring a new coach typically supplies.

The good news for Sunderland is that their two closest rivals, Swansea and Hull, both seem to have played their managerial hands for the season already, and to uncertain effect.

After months of hemming and hawing, Hull finally gave Mike Phelan a full-time job. Since then, they’ve played two and lost two by a combined score of 8-1. Swansea’s new owners, meanwhile, decided Bob Bradley was the man to lead the club forward, despite his lack of Premier League experience. So that’s the good news.

Of course the bad news is three teams get relegated.

I want my Pogback

The sooner you fall behind, the longer you have to catch up. Or, as was the case with Manchester United on Sunday, the sooner you fall behind, the longer you have to fall further behind.

United are in a strange position, having lost 4-0 to Chelsea, and sitting in seventh place in the league. Their manager, Jose Mourinho, faces new (or old) scrutiny, which appears especially damning this time given that his latest disappointment came at the hands of the players who so deliberately gave up on him last season, and looks, for perhaps the first time in his career, like he doesn’t care enough to do anything about it.

Sidebar: Chelsea’s 2015-16 season is, I maintain, one of the great mysteries of the modern Premier League. Many explained it by pointing to Mourinho’s history of leaving a trail of wreckage behind him, and suggested last season was a kind of comeuppance. Except those people must have been living in a different past, because while Mourinho left Chelsea (the first time) and Real Madrid in, shall we evasively say, “controversial” circumstances, there was no significant drop off in form, nor any real sense of betrayal. Similarly, it feels too simple to say he “lost the dressing room” — it would be more accurate to say the dressing room went for a walk, lost itself and showed up a few months later wearing a crown made fish bones and speaking Latin. No, last year was something different, something stranger, something seemingly having to do with things that have very little to do with the sport itself.

But anyway, after last season, when Mourinho says things after games such as Sunday’s like, “We made an incredible defensive mistake, I say incredible in capitals, in the first minute and then the game is different,” it’s tempting to wince at some imagined response among his players, who could quite easily interpret that negatively on their way under whichever mental bus they had hitherto been riding.

But the claim itself is true. Chris Smalling’s mistake, which allowed Pedro to open the scoring for Chelsea after only 30 seconds, was incredible, and while the mistakes by Eric Bailly and David de Gea on the same play were less incredible, they were not ultimately less damaging.

Still, mistakes will get made, even incredible ones, from time to time. The measure of a team, over the course of a league season, has never been their ability to perform when the going is good.

But United’s response to falling behind was unconvincing, to say the least. This team seems to lack any sort of balance. In a word, they look disjointed. Zlatan Ibrahimovic is the only player outside of the back five whose role feels fully defined. And that’s at least in part because, at the age of 35, there’s really only one thing he can do anymore (though admittedly he does it very well).

Marouane Fellaini and Ander Herrera make for an odd couple in central midfield; Marcus Rashford, Jess Lingard and, when he’s playing, Anthony Martial have looked uncertain about where exactly their orbits around Ibrahimovc are supposed to take them; and then there’s Paul Pogba, who is so, so good and who looks so, so lost right now.

Pogba, it seems worth repeating, is a dream of a player. He has about as complete a skillset as you could hope to imagine — strong, fast, powerful, unbelievably gifted technically, creative, smart. He is, in short, a pleasure to watch. But for a man who was so confident at Juventus, and who still seems so confident everywhere other than the pitch, his time at United has been characterized by a peculiar sort of shyness, an unwillingness to try things, to experiment.

There’s a question here about whether that’s Mourinho’s doing, whether Pogba’s manager has given him specific instructions that have curbed his natural instincts. Given what we know about Mourinho, and the demands he places even on his most gifted attacking players, this isn’t out of the question. And the overall team dysfunction certainly isn’t helping Pogba’s adjustment.

But there reaches a time in every match when the manager’s really got nothing to do with it. In United’s match against Chelsea Sunday that time came about 30 seconds in, and then it came again 15 minutes later, as Gary Cahill doubled the home side’s lead.

My criticism of Pogba is not really a criticism at all; it is a plea, a plea to do, a plea to try, a plea to just simply get on the ball and take it from there. Chelsea dominated this game, but they didn’t really dominate possession (they had 56 percent, per WhoScored).

The away side saw plenty of the ball. So did Pogba; his 87 touches trailed only Herrera and Antonio Valencia among United players. But he took almost no risks in possession. He had zero key passes, only one through ball, two shots.

I ask not that Pogba wins games such as these by himself (though he’s certainly capable of that). At this point I ask simply that he plays as if the possibility of his winning games such as these by himself is realistic (which it is). I ask that he expresses himself, that he plays with that unique combination of grace and power and flair and fun that made him worth half a bazillion dollars in the first place.

Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe Pogba is not destined to be that player. Maybe he’ll always be just a decoration, more Ben Arfa than Zidane. But at this point in his career he’s still young enough that anything remains possible. And he’s good enough that anything is what we should hope for.

I hate Manchester United, truly, deep in my bones. But Pogba is too special of a player to root against. The world will be a better place, however minimally, if Pogba is playing well in it. That sort of thing should, I think, be encouraged.

Weekly Awards

The Dirk Kuyt Award for Underappreciated Performance: Bournemouth

Bournemouth were terrific against Tottenham on Saturday, and after a difficult start to the season now find themselves comfortably in 10th place. Eddie Howe has done such a good job with this team. Their biggest weakness since getting promoted ahead of last season has been at the back, but Saturday’s clean sheet could signal a way forward in that department, namely, a more consistently implemented pressing game. Spurs are, it must be said, still coping with the absence of Harry Kane up front and Toby Alderweireld at the back, but even so, the Cherries were the better side for much of this match, more confident in their approach and displaying a fearlessness in possession that is still much too rare outside the top eight. Howe has been heavily linked with the England job since Sam Allardyce’s (hilarious) departure, but he’d do well to stay where he is. The England job is a disaster waiting to happen, and at 38 years old, Howe has time to wait for the FA to clean up its act before he agrees to work there. Establishing Bournemouth as a mid-table Premier League club and possibly even turning them into a challenger for the Europa League places would be a seriously impressive achievement for Howe, and a stepping stone to better things, much better things than the England job.

The Haten Ben Arfa Award for What Is Your Career?: Xherdan Shaqiri

Xherdan Shaqiri is an extremely talented player, as most recently evidenced by the two exquisite goals he scored in Stoke’s 2-0 win against Hull at the weekend. But Shaqiri may be more confusing than anything else. His career trajectory, which has taken him from Basel to Bayern Munich to Inter Milan to Stoke, obviously has the makings of a great dinner party conversation, but more to the point reflects an inability to do the sort of thing he did against Hull with any sort of consistency. He’s still only 25, and it’s possible he’ll get it together. But as it is, all there really is to do when Shaqiri does the sort of thing he did on Saturday — which he does a non-negligible amount of the time — is to wonder how exactly it came to this. Stoke are fine. Stoke are very, very, even aggressively, fine. None of which really explains what Shaqiri is doing there. Yes, the Premier League’s vast riches mean he’s probably getting paid twice as much as he would at a top six club in Italy or Germany or Spain, but even then, seriously? Is this what is happening? What is your career, Xherdan? I do not know.

The Marshawn Lynch Award for Get Off Me Child’s Play: Yannick Bolasie

Everton are not in a great place right now. After going unbeaten in their first five games of the season, they now have two points from four games, a stretch that includes losses to Bournemouth and Burnley, who beat the Toffees 2-1 at the weekend thanks to some questionable defensive decision making. There was, however, much to like about Everton’s only goal, in the buildup to which Yannick Bolasie more or less shoved his teammate, Romelu Lukaku, off the ball before finishing into the bottom corner. Bolasie is a very ridiculous player, and while that ridiculousness often pays dividends, it almost equally as often doesn’t pay any dividends at all. There are very few areas of the pitch I’d back Bolasie to score from ahead of Lukaku. But Bolasie does not care about me. Or Lukaku. Or Tom Heaton in the Burnley goal. Bolasie does what he wants, thank you very much, and that’s why we love him.

The Fabio Borini Award for Most Hilarious Substitute Appearance: Sofiane Boufal

Southampton were excellent away at Manchester City. They had to ride their luck a few times, but that’s sometimes the way it’s got to be against a team as good as City. For the most part, however, they restricted the Citizens to half chances and managed to pose a constant threat on the break themselves. Anyway, it became apparent about 70 minutes in the Saints would settle for a draw, at around which point new signing Sofiane Boufal came on for Dusan Tadic. Boufal had some really, really wonderful touches in some very tight spaces, but he also, and much more consequentially, seemed to fail almost completely to grasp the context of the game he had lately entered, playing several high-risk, low-reward passes through midfield that were gleefully picked off by City players. That was the first time I’ve seen Boufal, and I liked him a lot, but next time someone should probably give him some instructions before he comes on the pitch.

The Arsene Wenger Award for Having Seen This Movie Before: Arsenal

Arsenal’s struggles against Middlesbrough should serve as a reminder of how quickly this Gunners side is capable of slipping into familiar habits. We’ve seen this game countless times before: underdog opponent comes to the Emirates, sets out to frustrate Arsenal, Arsenal drop points. Arsenal’s problem under Arsene Wenger has never been an inability to blow teams away, as they had been doing for almost two months straight before Saturday. Their problem has been the regularity and ease with which they let disappointing individual results impact their overall form. A lone 0-0 draw at home against relegation candidates is nowhere near close to enough to derail a title challenge. But the result sows a seed of doubt, the same sort of doubt that has crippled Arsenal so many times over the past decade. Perhaps this will be the year Arsenal finally pull it all together, but the suggestion, based on what we’ve see so far, scintillating though it has sometimes been, that they’ve discovered the remedy to their old mental woes belies a decades worth of evidence to the contrary. Therein lies the Arsenal conundrum: it’s impossible to justifiably claim they no longer suffer from their usual mental frailties until they go a whole season without succumbing to them.