Never, ever make Barcelona angry

When scanning the football results of a Monday morning, we at Tactically Naive spend most of our time looking for numbers that are up to something. A small number sitting next to a big name — hey, you shouldn’t be there! what’s your story? — or a big number holding hands with a smaller club.

Big numbers in general, to be honest. Fours are exciting, fives even better. Everybody loves a six. But this Monday, we got a special treat. It all got a bit silly out in Spain, and …

A theory: eight goals is the most disrespectful number of goals that one football team can score against another. Seven is bad, of course, but it’s not eight. Yet if you see nine goals or more, then that’s a truly freak result. Something must have happened. Nobody just scores nine.

Eight sits right at the pinnacle, the greatest humiliation possible within the boundaries of comprehension, just before it all dissolves into weirdness.

Perhaps this is coloured by that glorious/hideous [delete according to taste] day when Manchester United dismantled Arsenal by eight goals to two, a game that stands as the Premier League’s most extravagant act of elite-on-elite violence. Barcelona did the same thing to SD Huesca this weekend, winning 8-2, and while it feels a little more like bullying, in truth the losing side have nobody to blame but themselves.

The clever thing to do, when playing against one of the world’s most high-powered football teams, is turtle up, take the punches, and try and escape without too much damage to your dignity or your goal difference. Such is the stretched, top-heavy nature of football at the moment. Such is the world that the Champions League has delivered us. It’s Barcelona’s world, and everybody smaller just has to survive in it.

Or not. Because what you absolutely do not do is go to the Nou Camp, set up to attack, and then score first. It may be brave. It may be bold. But ultimately you’ve run up to a mother bear that’s holding a sword in each paw and riding an armour-plated dinosaur, booped her on the nose, and then insulted her children. It won’t end well.

A couple of weeks ago Tactically Naive looked at Ronaldo’s slow, goalless start to life in Turin, and shrugged. So it goes. A new country, a new league, new teammates, a new system. A new location on the slowly spinning earth. It takes time to adjust.

However. Since he has now failed to score in three whole games, all in a row, we can now see that we were wrong. That early barren game wasn’t simply a blip, it was a warning: Ronaldo is not Ronaldo.

Even the Italian press have begun to notice, and here we must give credit to Corriere dello Sport, whose headline of CR5.5 managed to attack both performance and brand in just four characters, plus a decimal point. That’s beautiful efficiency.

Anyway, somebody or something has knocked 1.5 off CR7, and we’ve narrowed the possibilities down to three:

1. At some point along the transfer process, Ronaldo — the real one — was abducted. This bloke shambling around the pitches of Serie A is an impostor, possibly wearing some kind of body suit. Ruses are occurring.

2. All those British stereotypes about Italian defending are actually true.

3. Three games is more than one game, but still isn’t all that many, and everybody needs to calm down. Including us. Especially us.

It’s the first one, isn’t it? Give him back, you swines! Arrest that sculptor!

Early days, but the Premier League is taking shape, and after four games only three teams have managed to take the maximum 12 points. Two of them are Chelsea and Liverpool, which isn’t much of a surprise: the Londoners may have been poor last season, but they are still Big Sixers, while Liverpool have a proper goalkeeper now … wait, he did what? Oh wow.

The third, of course, is Watford.

Watford, for those of you unfamiliar with England and its geography, is a town about 20 miles northwest of London. It is located close to the Watford Gap, a space between two hills that holds a motorway and does work as the punchline for perhaps Britain’s most tired joke. And that’s a crowded field.

Person from the south of England: Where does the north begin?

Other person from the south of England: At the Watford Gap.

The humour here is in the fact that half of England literally does not care about the other half.

Anyway, Watford’s football club was once home to John Barnes and Graham Taylor, and is most famously supported by Elton John, who has a stand named in his honour. They are nicknamed the Hornets, but they have a moose on their badge. This is a clever psyop to distract opponents, and it seems to be working. On Saturday they beat Spurs 2-1 to move joint top of the Premier League.

Their success has been built on some canny off-field decisions, and an excellent taste in managers. Last season, they were great fun under Marco Silva until his head was turned by Everton. And this season, under Javi Gracia, they’re barrelling along nicely. The win against Spurs was a pugnacious thing: two big headers from set pieces to cancel out an own goal; plenty of attacking intent, particularly from Roberto Pereyra; and just a little edge to proceedings. Nothing silly. But enough to keep Spurs uncomfortable.

In this they are helped by the presence of The Great and Amazing Troy Deeney, who sounds like an escapologist, heads the ball like an Easter Island statue, and celebrates his goals like he wants to have a fight with an Easter Island statue. Or the corner flag. Or that man dressed as a hornet, who should be dressed as a moose.

He’s great fun, and so are Watford. And their next game, on the other side of the international break, is Manchester United at home. An early chance to truly establish themselves as the favourite team of every neutral in the country. On the basis of the season so far, they’re probably favourites.

Hasn’t David Ospina suffered enough?