Peter Crouch approaches history
Here’s to the big men with the good touches
Of all English soccer’s many clichés, my favorite is the big man with the good touch. It’s my favorite mainly because of how stupid it is, but also because the thing about most professional athletes is their ability to make hard things look easy, and the thing about big men with good touches is their ability to make hard things look almost exactly has hard as they actually are.
The big man with the good touch is dying, however, as small men with even better touches and medium-sized men with pace have stolen the game away from him. But this weekend was a good one for big men of all shapes and touches.
The most historic performance by a big man with a good touch came at the Stadium of Light, where Peter Crouch, who is still alive, scored his 99th career Premier League goal.
My favorite thing about Peter Crouch is how easy it is to compare him to inanimate objects. Foldable beach chair, crane, an umbrella with all the fabric taken off so it’s only the metal frame … the list goes on. Certain kinds of tall lamps, for example.
My second favorite thing about Peter Crouch is that he really is a wonderful player. It takes extraordinary talent and focus and dedication to be useful for over a decade at the level he’s been useful at for over a decade. He’s never been a star, but he’s always been good, and he’s always found ways to exploit his unique physical gifts, without ever reducing himself to them. Now he’s on the precipice of history, set to become only the 26th man ever to score 100 Premier League goals.
The achievement is even more exciting because it has come somewhat out of the blue. Crouch has spent much of the past two seasons on the Stoke bench, appearing in public mostly to make extremely high quality self-deprecating jokes on Twitter. Crouch scored his 98th Premier League goal on New Year’s Eve, over a year after he scored his 97th, and a month before his 36th birthday.
His 99th Premier League goal wasn’t exactly a classic, but it felt appropriate. Charlie Adam played the sort of pass he has, for reasons I’ll never fully understand, been able to turn into a career, which is to say extremely high in the air and with a confidence that is apparently quality-proof.
Crouch jumped a little bit and hung in the air a little moment — just long enough to let the Sunderland keeper, Vito Mannone, get a sense of his tallness, and subsequently to make a bad decision. Crouch, a world-class inspiration for bad goalkeeping decisions, meanwhile, was still in the air, waiting for the precipice of history to bump him on the head and tumble meekly into an empty net. And here we now are.
There are not many things I realized I wanted more than for Peter Crouch to score his 100th Premier League goal. But no matter what else happens, if he reaches that milestone, I think this season must go down as not completely a waste of time.
Crouch’s heroics seemed to have a knock-on effect, too, as big men across the league embraced their good touches. The most emphatic good touch by a big man came at the London Stadium, where Andy Carroll threw his entire, humungous self fully upside down in the air to kick the living bicycles out of a Michail Antonio cross that may well have been designed in laboratory specifically for Andy Carroll to kick the living bicycles out of.
It was a ferociously good goal, and a nice excuse to revel in the many different ways a big man can have a good touch, whether it’s Crouch’s human origami or Carroll, who seems to have invented a fourth law of motion.
The goal, West Ham’s second in a 3-0 win, also broke the London Stadium curse. It was the first time since moving to their new ground the Hammers have won a league match by a score other than 1-0, and only the second time they’ve scored more than a single goal (the first came in a 4-2 loss against Watford).
That is hopefully a sign of things to come, because the London Stadium has been the site of some astonishingly boring soccer this season, and if I’m going to have to watch games that are played there, they may as well be good.
Finally, there was Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who’s touch is so good no one seems to care he’s also a big man. Which is a shame, because he’s a very big man. I think his equalizer against Liverpool hasn’t received the credit it deserves, possibly because Antonio Valencia was offside in the build up, or possibly because it seemed to happen very slowly, so slowly the fact of the ball going into the net overshadowed the journey it took to get there.
(Side bar: according to the internet, which may not be accurate, Manchester United have now scored either five offside goals in their last seven matches at Old Trafford, or six in their last four, or six in their last seven. Anyway, it seems to be a lot. I don’t buy into the idea certain clubs receive preferential treatment from refs, but I think it’s safe to say Jose Mourinho has lost his right to complain about bad luck.)
Anyway, that header. Crikey. It was really, really, really good. Ibrahimovic had to stoop down — and remember, he’s a very big man — to get his head on the cross and still managed both to get it up and over a scrambling Simon Mignolet, and to keep it out of reach of Trent Alexander-Arnold on the line.
It was made even better by the general presence of the league’s foremost big man with a bad touch, Marouane Fellaini, who’s introduction late on was the catalyst for United’s comeback. The best part of it all was that it led Ibrahimovic to point out in his post-match interview with NBC that Fellaini was brought on more or less specifically to make the game as ugly as possible, which is obviously exactly what he did.
So here’s to the big men with the good touches. There may be a time, in the not so distant future, when they have disappeared from the game completely. But now at least it seems when that time comes we’ll be able to look in the history books, and perusing the list of great Premier League goal scorers, read the name of their patron saint, the biggest man with the best touch of all: Peter Crouch, 100.
Weekly Awards
The David Nugent Award for Goal Poaching: Romelu Lukaku
Everton enjoyed the most emphatic win of a weekend full of emphatic wins, beating Manchester City 4-0 at Goodison Park on Sunday. The result was made even sweeter by the performance of 18-year-old academy product Tom Davies. Davies was influential throughout, but his best moment came late in the second half, when he beat two City players before exchanging passes with Ross Barkley and dinking the ball over Claudio Bravo. As the ball rolled toward the net, however, Romelu Lukaku appeared (probably not) literally out of nowhere to try and get a touch on it and claim the goal for himself. He didn’t get a touch on it, but that’s really beside the point. That was some world-class sneaky bullshit, and if I was Ronald Koeman I’d bench him immediately.
The Alan Pardew Award for Worst Comeback: Joey Barton
In a lot of ways, Joey Barton’s Burnley comeback was good, like in the way he scored the winning goal after coming on as a substitute to give the Clarets their eighth home win in 12 matches. In a lot of other ways, however, Joey Barton’s Burnley comeback was bad, like in the way the free-kick he scored was terrible and more importantly in the reminder it served of why he was making his Burnley comeback in the first place. To wit: he spent his time at Rangers acting like a total moron, getting in an almost certainly avoidable beef with manager Mark Warburton and then getting accused of betting on matches. Good to have you back, Joey. Except not actually at all.
The Mesut Ozil Award for Flying Under The Radar: Christian Eriksen
Tottenham, finally, are not only playing well but also playing excitingly, which is a big step up from earlier in the season. Predictably, Harry Kane and Dele Alli have received most of the plaudits. They’ve scored a lot of goals and are English and young and one of them just had a baby (congrats, Harry). It makes sense, really, but even so, it’s frustrating to hear Christian Eriksen discussed mostly as the third amigo, rather than what he is, which is by far the most interesting of the three, a player so subtle and intelligent with and without the ball it should probably come as no surprise no one really knows what to say about him. He was wonderful again in Spurs’ win against West Brom — his assist for the opener was the highlight — and is now fast approaching uh-oh-do-you-remember-what-happened-to-Luka-Modric territory.
The Harry Redknapp Award for Terribly Good Management: the Hull owners
Hull have been a disaster this season in most ways it’s possible for a team to be a disaster: first off the pitch and then on the pitch and then, until recently, both. The number of inexplicable decisions the owners have made over the past year or so has been staggering, but now, I guess as demanded by the law of averages, they seem to have done something right. That thing is Marco Silva, who has won two (one in the league, one in the FA Cup) of his first three matches in charge of the Tigers since replacing the not-at-all-to-blame-for-Hull’s-problems Mike Phelan. Three games is too small a sample size to draw any significant conclusions of course, but two wins in three is certainly a step in the right direction. Then again, Hull’s next four league games come against Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal, which makes this either the worst or the best possible time for Hull to have appointed a manager they actually seem to want.
The Dimitri Payet Award for Excellence In Body Language: Alexis Sanchez
Alexis Sanchez is one of the Premier League’s very, very best players. Lately, Sanchez has been upset for reasons that are not entirely clear but seem to have something to do with Arsenal’s preternatural ability to get really close to winning things without actually winning things. The Chilean stormed off the pitch after getting substituted on Saturday, with Arsenal leading Swansea by four goals, and sat next to the bench with his coat over his head, sulking. The first thing I thought about this is that I couldn’t care less. Some players are good enough and valuable enough to a team they can slap their manager right in the mouth and get away with it. Sanchez is as close to one of those players as the Premier League has. The second thing about this is that not 48 hours later Sanchez pleaded guilty to over a $1 million worth of tax fraud, which means I now do care because there’s a possibility, however small, that’s actually what’s been bothering him the entire time, and therefore that we have reached the climax of modern soccer pseudo-controversy. The only way is down.