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First off, a big win for me! I sold my story “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter” to Zahir: A Journal of Speculative Fiction, which is a gorgeous little magazine. Lots of “close, but not quite right” rejection slips too, so it’s good to find a home for it.

I wrote this story for a workshop on “Magic and Wonder” during my MA year, and it became a part of my final MA Project; to date, it’s the only one of the four stories that has sold so I’m pleased that one finally has.

I watched bits and pieces from several games from the opening weekend including: the last half hour of Citeh @ Blackburn; the last half hour of Birmingham @ Man Ure; the opening twenty minutes of Ars*nal @ Everton; and all of Liverpool @ Spurs. I also followed the scores as they happened and there were definitely some surprise results.

However. Many cliche’s can be trotted out at this point, including the oft-used “the race to the title is a marathon not a sprint.” The table rarely starts to take a recognizable shape for six to eight weeks and many of these squads are still trying to gel, figuring out how to best use the current squad. Still, points are points and with how tight it gets at the top and bottom of the table, teams generally can’t afford to be slow out of the gates if they have aspirations to stay up or win the league.

One of the biggest factors in winning the league is squad depth, which really doesn’t come into play until the winter months when the games start to pile up, teams accumulate injuries, and fatigue sets in. For those without a memory, two teams who wear red led the pack recently only to falter midway, then struggled to keep the pace for the rest of the season.

So what am I saying with all this? That Man Ure and Chelski will be happy with wins even if they weren’t convincing; it may take a month or more for them to truly find their top form. Both of these clubs have a history of not letting up as the long season wears on. Looking at the other two of the Big Four, I’m far than convinced. Liverpool looked disjointed and not very dangerous against Spurs; Babel was a waste of space and ‘Pool really didn’t seriously start to threaten until Benayoun came on. Voronin? Really? The club seems to have slipped back to the 2007-08 season and that’s not good. It’s not that this team hasn’t found a rhythm, it’s that this same set of players has been tried and found wanting in the past. How are they magically going to become world beaters? (Answer: they won’t) This is bad for them.

Ars*nal have a different problem. Their dismantling of Everton showed off their attacking assets but that’s never really been in question. They may be able to pass mediocre teams off the park but they don’t have enough steel in the midfield to consistently beat the top teams, and they’re nowhere near as good as Barcelona at simply keeping the ball away from their opponents. The mantra from Ars*nal fans this season (all together now) is that if the squad can stay healthy, they have a real chance. My rebuttal is, when have they ever stayed healthy? Injuries happen to all teams and it all comes down to how you cope; Ars*nal, for whatever reason, tend to have more injuries than most and they don’t cope very well. I don’t see how the squad getting one more year of maturity helps this problem. I predict this squad will get plenty of lopsided wins and will have a robust goal differential by season’s end, but I also suspect—as always—that they’ll also have too many games where teams park the bus in front of goal (another cliche’!) and they won’t be able to score a scrappy goal to give them the points.

Now even short-term readers of this space know that I harbor no good will for Ars*nal, but I can accept that they can play some stunning footie but in Saturday’s case, I would humbly suggest that Everton helped quite a bit with that scoreline. There are times when a team is so damn good that they opposition can’t get a kick in (see Barca vs Man Ure in the Champs League final, or even Man Ure vs. Ars*nal in both legs of the semis) but that is not what happened at Everton. Ars*nal scored a good goal and the Toffees completely collapsed. There was nothing particularly special about any of the other five goals, except for the special quality of the dreadful defending. It looks to me like Jolean Lescott is well unsettled by the Man City bid and he passed the bug to the rest of the team.

This is known as Spurs syndrome and it’s something Everton and Villa will need to try and overcome. While it’s all well and good to laugh at Spurs’ inability to sustain a push for the top four, it conveniently overlooks the fact that their best players have constantly been stripped from the squad by the teams they’re trying to overhaul, most notably Campbell, Carrick, Berbatov, and Keane. Having these guys go rather than sticking it out dents the psyche of the team, and I think Villa and Everton will suffer that same way having lost (or likely about to lose) key players. You can’t build if you keep losing your foundation, to coin a metaphor.

Finally, what can you say about Spurs? They’ve made no signings to get my heart racing (although I do adore Wilson Palacios) yet they looked handy enough yesterday and, as many have pointed out, the score would have been much worse had Keane not missed a hat-trick of chances. They’ll be right back in the mix with Villa, Citeh and Everton for those close-but-not-quite positions beneath the top four. Citeh, by the way, are going to be the team I most want watch week in, week out. The game against Blackburn was great stuff, primarily because you have no idea what’s going to happen next. With the quality on the field they could carve out some stupidly, beyond-belief goal at any second, or they can comically implode just as quickly. Riveting.

And can you believe the Champions League starts tomorrow? Me neither.

Current Mood: Case of the Blahs |