Tommy Martin: Premier League? On second thoughts, let’s not go there. It is a silly place
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp during the loss to Southampton. The defending champions are now without a win in three games.
After the festive frenzy, let’s check in on the Premier League.
Liverpool, without a win in three games, are top of the table. Manchester United, rubbish three weeks ago, are now title contenders. The whereabouts of Jose Mourinho’s mojo are once again uncertain. Previously frazzled Pep Guardiola is back to being a giant-brained tactics god. Also, Frank Lampard? Booo! Mikel Arteta? Yay!
Meanwhile, chief medical officer Sam Allardyce recommended a two-week circuit breaker and Southampton manager Ralph Hasenhüttl broke down and cried like a baby.
To quote King Arthur in : On second thoughts, let’s not to go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
Making sense of the English top flight has become the job of a vast global commentariat. Think of the credit rating agencies of the financial world but with, say, Mo Salah’s groin instead of the price of oil.
Millions pay attention to the verdicts of this media-industrial complex, whose membership includes grizzled ex-professional pundits, broadsheet chin-strokers, tactical blog Poindexters and boggle-eyed loons on YouTube fan TV channels.
But what if it all suddenly stopped making sense? What then?
It always seemed likely that this season would pan out that way. At the outset, this column feared two things. Firstly that the hectic fixture schedule, the absence of fans, and the general lockdown mood would make it a grim, joyless trudge.
Secondly, that the unique conditions would throw up random sequences of results and that we would be looking at the season as if it were an abstract painting: yes, very nice, but what does it all mean?
One out of two ain’t bad. While it has indeed all gone a bit Jackson Pollock, it has certainly been fun.
We underestimated the pleasure that one can get from watching other people’s pain. This is known as the Japanese Gameshow Phenomenon, where millions will tune in to see a Tokyo businessman kicked repeatedly in the private parts.
This season’s bizarre fluctuations mean that the identity of those doubled over in agony changes every few weeks. Currently, it is Frank Lampard gulping for breath, eyes watering. This is the same Frank Lampard who, back when Christmas decorations were being hung up, seemed poised to launch a title challenge, sign a new long-term contract, and probably bring out his own Coronavirus vaccine while he was at it.
It’s fair to say that the Chelsea manager had fewer reasons to smile this festive season than the studio audience for . Four defeats in six matches and the galleries have turned their gaze towards Roman Abramovich, anticipating the thumbs down.
For the Premier League opinion formers, Lampard’s status in the game is a double-edged sword.
While punditry’s inner circle are slow to criticise one of their own, those on the outside are proportionally pitiless.
Lampard is seen by many as the undeserving son who has been handed the keys to the family business; whose gilded path has left him underqualified for the job at hand, even when lavished with €250m worth of talent to play with. Not only that, but by publicly calling out his players following the 3-1 defeat to Arsenal, he played the classic role of the spoilt child, tossing his very expensive toys out of the pram and under an onrushing bus.
According to many observers, Lampard’s future depends on the twitchiness of the notorious Abramovich trigger-finger. But in pleading for his life in the court of the Stamford Bridge Sun King, Lampard can point to just how transient this season’s certainties can be.
He might gesture in the direction of Manchester United, where Ole Gunnar Solskjaer heads the most unlikely title challenge since, well, all this season’s other unlikely title challenges.
If there is any man whose fortunes are emblematic of this surreal campaign, then it is surely Solskjaer. Ole is at the wheel, the song says, but until very recently he appeared to be impersonating Captain Smith of the Titanic.
United’s Champions League exit was a case in point, each of their three defeats its own special treatise in the art of the managerial cockup. Appointed because of a goal he scored two decades ago, Solskjaer had never looked more like the wrong man.
Indeed, when the camera would cut to him after a moment of disaster, he had the same shocked look on his face as that taxi driver who accidentally ended up being interviewed on BBC News about internet piracy.
And now look at him! Maybe he is the right man after all. It could be, the analysts speculate, that what an expensively assembled squad of superstars need is a relatively low-key manager who will allow them to jazz riff each other to glory. Ole could be the Vicente Del Bosque of the North.
Lamps, Ole, Jose, Pep, Arteta, Ancelotti, Rodgers — they have all had a kick in the unmentionables at one stage or another this season. This week, people are asking what’s gone wrong with Liverpool, who, after a bad Christmas, are mired in first place.
The point is that no-one knows anything anymore. Usually, the league table provides the final, unquestionable verdict. This season you can throw a blanket over the top 10. They can’t all be good, but they can’t all be that bad either.
What all the teams have had in common is a spell in which their players have seemed a bit flat, out of puff, down in the dumps…all of which are perfectly understandable in the circumstances. Any further theories risk being upended by another of this campaign’s banana-skins.
The nature of the modern media is that you must declare your opinion as if you are planting a flag.
Nuance is not permitted. Events in the wider world show us that this approach has never been more ludicrous, or dangerous.
In the words of Voltaire, the top pundit of his day, while doubt is an uncomfortable condition, certainty is absurd.
Or at least it is in this particular, rather silly season.
