The Premier League’s black hole
The Premier League, as everyone knows for an absolute Faberge egg of a fact, is the most entertaining in all the world. This is a league, after all, where every week a team no one wants to read about beats another team lots of people want to read about. This week, for example, Hull beat Liverpool.
But in between that sort of irresistible drama, away from the glare of the Premier League’s much-heralded intensity, is a dirty little secret: the mid-table. With 14 matches left to play, and the race for the top four and the battle to avoid relegation tightening, four teams in particular stand out for the total lack of anything even remotely interesting to say about them: West Ham, Watford, Stoke and Burnley.
Having nothing to play for is a blessing and a curse — a blessing because it means you’re not getting relegated (and as a result don’t really need to try at your job), and a curse because it engenders the sort of slow-burn directionless malaise that is so often the prelude to a full-on relegation battle the next season.
The latest victim of this special mid-table ennui was Dimitri Payet, who was so overwhelmed after half a season of truly meaningless Premier League drift, he simply refused to keep playing. It takes a hardy soul to survive the mid-table.
But so anyway, what’s the point of these pointless teams? That’s a good question. It’s possible there isn’t one, but given there’s still three whole months left of this season, and therefore a non-negligible chance you’re going to find yourself watching one of these teams in the near future, you owe it to yourself to find a way to care.
Besides, assuming Slaven Bilic, Mark Hughes, Sean Dyche and Walter Mazzarri want to be able to make their players try and stuff, they’ll need a strategy to keep them motivated. I’ll take their teams one by one, in order from most to least convincing reasons to stay interested.
Burnley
Burnley’s away record is very, very, very bad — almost as bad, in fact, as it’s possible for an away record to be. When you type “Premier League table” into Google, Google shows you a nice, sleek graphic the perusal of which might lead you to note Burnley’s nine wins in 24 games and their 29 points and their 12th place, which in turn might lead you to think, “this is a team I do not need to form an opinion about.” This is too bad, really.
Because when you do stumble upon one of those other, fancier Premier League tables that divides home and away results, you will notice, if you are a math genius, that 96.6 percent of the Clarets’ points have come from their home fixtures, and if you are not a math genius, that 28 of the Clarets’ 29 points have come from their home fixtures.
Burnley’s home form is so good that if they replicated it away from home, they, not Tottenham, would be “The Only Team Capable of Catching Chelsea in the Title Race” (which is a silly title, because no one’s catching Chelsea in the title race).
The away record, in contrast, is not quite so peachy. Which is a massive understatement. Math-doers of all abilities will be able tell you that the difference between 28 and 29 is one, which is the number of away points Burnley have won this season. That’s historically bad.
Six teams in the history of the Premier League have gone a full league season without an away win. Two of them, Leeds in 1992-93 and Coventry in 1999-00, avoided relegation, both with seven total away points. The worst away record in Premier League history belongs to Derby, who in 2007-08 won three of their 11 total points away from home.
Burnley, after 11 away matches, are on pace to finish with 1.7 away points. They won’t do that, because that’s a fraction, but they might set a new record.
The motivation for the remainder of the season is simple: win an away game. The Clarets’ remaining away fixtures are, for the most part, pretty winnable. They travel to Hull, Swansea, Liverpool, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Everton, Crystal Palace and Bournemouth.
Hull are now apparently the best team in the division, so that’ll be tough, and Everton are excellent at home, and Liverpool used to be excellent at home and may or may not be excellent at home again at some point in the near future. So let’s — and remember this is Burnley we’re talking about, so this isn’t exactly a stretch — chalk those up as losses.
That leaves Swansea, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Crystal Palace and Bournemouth, which incidentally is about as depressing a set of five Premier League teams as you can come up with that doesn’t include Burnley.
Whatever happens between now and May, Sean Dyche’s side can look back on an excellent season, but whether or not they also look back on the worst season in the history of Premier League away games … well, that’s up to them.
West Ham
There’s a lot going on at West Ham these days. Unfortunately, not much of it’s on the pitch. Their season has been moving from one strange phase to another since August. It began with the oh-no-we-might-get-relegated phase and then moved on to the oh-no-our-new-stadium-is-just-bad phase. That was followed by a brief, but pleasant this-isn’t-actually-so-bad phase, which turned into the I-hope-Dimitri-Payet-rots-in-the-reserves-for-the-next-200-years phase and it’s currently in the I-can’t-believe-it’s-come-to-this-but-the-only-thing-currently-making-this-worthwhile-is-Andy-Carroll phase.
All of which is to say there’s a lot of little things going on at West Ham, and it’s hard to know how to piece them all together.
But probably the biggest, most important thing is that the London Stadium is a horrible place where atmosphere goes to die. This is probably, unfortunately, mostly true. Some stadiums are simply not built to create atmosphere — a fact which is made all the more painful because West Ham’s old stadium seemed custom made to do exactly that.
But there’s always hope. 60,000 people is a lot of people, and if Andy Carroll keeps scoring bicycle kicks, there’s no reason to believe the Hammers can’t eventually make the London Stadium feel like home.
That, more than anything, is what West Ham need to wake them up from their post-Upton Park sleep walk of a season: a rousing win at their new stadium — come-from-behind, last-minute-winner, low-level-pitch-invasion sort of stuff. That’s going to be tough if their performance against Manchester City last week is any indication, but this is still a talented team and, as per the first rule of the most entertaining league in all the world, everybody beats everybody else eventually.
West Ham’s best bet looks like a Monday night match against Chelsea in early March. Chelsea don’t lose, which will make beating them difficult, but there’s also a good chance they’ll have extended their lead at the top of the table to even more than nine points by then, and their famously flaky squad will be all over the world on their various mental vacations, which is exactly the opening the Hammers need.
West Ham vs. Chelsea, March 6. Mark your calendars.
Stoke
Stoke finished ninth last season, and they finished ninth the season before that, and they also finished ninth the season before that.
This season, however, they’re currently 11th, which is a disaster for the Potters brand.
The story about Stoke is that they replaced Tony Pulis with Mark Hughes a few years ago, and that was going to make them pass the ball on the floor and stuff. It has, mostly. For example, a couple of weeks ago, Marko Arnautovic scored this wonderful goal against Sunderland. Stoke didn’t score these sorts of goals under Pulis, and so in that specific sense the managerial change has been a success.
In another sense — which is the sense that finishing ninth every season is an achievement in only a very specific, non-achieving sort of way — the managerial change hasn’t been a success.
But it’s too late to worry about Europe, and it’s also too late to worry about a cup run, because Stoke were knocked out of both domestic cups very early, which means the target for Stoke is to ensure that, if they’re not going to take a step forward this season, they should at least not take a step backward.
This means they need to finish ninth. I don’t know what the record is for consecutive seasons finishing in the same spot in the table, but I’m guessing four would be mighty close. And since Stoke are obviously not going to break any actual records any time soon, they may as well break the record for consecutive ninth-place finishes. The race for ninth is well and truly on.
Watford
What is the current percentage chance Walter Mazzarri is sacked at the end of this season? Is it 100? Or is it only 90? Whatever the exact number, the upshot is that Mazzarri is going to be sacked at the end of the season.
Why? Who cares. That’s not how Watford operate.
But I think this is good news.
When I think about Watford, the first thing I think about is Troy Deeney, and when I’m done thinking about Troy Deeney I’m left with a yellow and black image that is too blurry to make out what it actually is.
All things considered, the Hornets have had a successful season. Established mid-table status is not to be sniffed at for a club in only their second consecutive season in the top flight.
What Watford lack is an identity, and Mazzarri doesn’t appear to be the man to provide them with one. That being the case, the best thing for the Hornets would be a late season, Crystal Palace-esque collapse of form.
Not so bad a collapse as to get relegated, but enough to get a new manager, and to begin the cycle of identity renewal all over again. There are no second acts in American lives, they say, but there are second and third and fourth managers in the Premier League mid-table.
Weekly Awards
The Aaron Lennon Award for Running In Straight Lines: Adama Traore
Middlebrough are not the most entertaining side in the Premier League, although the 19 goals they’ve scored in 24 matches is testament to the fact that if you really try your hardest not to score any goals, you’ll probably do a pretty good job of it. But there is a lone bright spot, a single source of entertainment amid the larger Teesside vista of monotony. His name is Adama Traore. Traore isn’t good, per se. He doesn’t score or assist literally any goals. But he is exciting. He’s a good dribbler and he’s strong and he’s so fast Kyle Walker had to visibly exert effort to keep up with him when the two faced each other on Saturday. Above all, though, he’s exciting because he will dribble forward anytime, anywhere, anyhow. No support? No problem. Of course this issue is exacerbated by Aitor Karanka’s zero attacker system, but I can’t think of a player in the Premier League who makes hopeless running more enjoyable.
The Thierry Henry Award for Goals: Eden Hazard
My favorite thing about Eden Hazard playing well is listening to people try to account for his extremely average 2015-16 season. It turns out, much to everyone’s apparent surprise, there appears to be a correlation between effort and success. Color me shocked. Hazard’s excellent 2016-17 had probably its finest moment yet on Saturday, when he shrugged of Francis Coquelin as if he were a small and annoying child and then beat several other Arsenal defenders on the way to doubling Chelsea’s lead. It was a great goal.
The Socrates Award for Rhetorical Questions?: Lee Dixon
NBC’s questionably branded “Arlo, Lee and Graeme’s Excellent Adventure” was about as
entertaining as you’d expect watching three men drive from one side of a city to another would be.
But it seemed worth it when Lee Dixon asked, during Tottenham’s match against Middlesbrough,
after Arlo White described a particularly sizeable clearance as “no-nonense,” “I’m just intrigued by
what a nonsense clearance is, as opposed to a no-nonsense clearance? What’s the difference?”
There’s an idea going around these days that it’s a commentators job to provide analysis. I find that to be an unfortunate attitude. Because why worry about what’s happening on the pitch when you could instead listen to Lee Dixon say literally every single thought that pops into his head?
The Emanuel Adebayor Award for Provocative Celebrations: Ross Barkley
Everton and Bournemouth played out a very crazy game on Saturday that ended 6-3 to the Toffees. Romelu Lukaku got most of the attention for scoring four goals, but Ross Barkley was the real hero. The Englishman scored Everton’s sixth and most pointless goal late in second half stoppage time, which he celebrated, much to many people’s annoyance, before he had even put the ball in the net. Those sorts of shenanigans are typically frowned upon by the moral guardians of the beautiful game, but it was also extremely hilarious. Congratulations, Ross.
The Not J.R.R Tolkein Award for Disappointing Returns Of The King: Sam Allardyce
Sam Allardyce was Sunderland’s hero last season, but he has spent most of this season embracing his full idiot potential. After an ill-fated sojourn as England manager, Big Sam returned to his spiritual home, the Premier League relegation battle, with Crystal Palace. He had been doing neither a good job nor a bad job until Saturday, when he faced his old club for the first time, and was soundly beaten 4-0. “Fear gripped the players and it hasn’t allowed them to express their ability,” is what Allardyce said about it, which is history’s most poetic description of a 4-0 loss to a team managed by David Moyes.