It’s been said before and will be said again, but nevertheless: however diverting the football, the first international break of any season is bobbins. It’s the person from Porlock of football, a doubtless well-meaning but inconvenient distraction that serves no real purpose except to totally fracture the season that was, back home, just starting to take some shape. And some Euros qualifying, obviously. But Wales couldn’t get the job done, so even that was a bit rubbish.
In praise of stupid red cards
The Premier League is on pace to break its own record for red cards, and some have already been wonderfully stupid. Let’s hope the international break hasn’t calmed everybody down.
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Still, it’s probably the least worst way of arranging qualification, and it’s done now. Domestic football will return next weekend and will continue, grubby and glorious and uninterrupted, until ... oh dear. October 9th. A month from today. Let’s hope that those 30 days are enough to let the Premier League get back into its stride. Because before Roy Hodgson and his merry men came along, the English top flight was showing some promise.
We’re not talking about the title race, obviously. The early signs — and they are very early signs, and might yet be false ones — are that like last season, the inadequacies of everybody else is going to see one team canter home. Nor are we talking about relegation, though there’s plenty of time for that to get interesting. We’re talking, of course, about stupid red cards.
After a mere four weeks and 40 games, the English top flight has already enjoyed 11 sendings off. Extrapolate that out over a season, and it’s on course for 104 (and a half, but that’s just a yellow card, so we can ignore it). Which would be some going compared to last season’s 73, which itself equaled 2002-03 for the most dismissals in a single 20-team Premier League season. An average season yields about 63. Exciting times for connoisseurs of dismissals and the humour that they bring.
There are, broadly speaking, four kinds of red card. One of them is always funny, and two of them can be. The one that isn’t is the despicable red card — the ankle-snapper, the cheekbone-smasher — and they are so unfunny that they manage even to defeat the comedy inherent in the sight of one grown man using a square of brightly coloured cardboard to instruct another grown man to leave a field while some more grown men nod approvingly and some others shout in disagreement and despair. Which takes some doing.
The two that can be funny, given the circumstances, are the professional red card and the unjust red card. The former — think Ole Gunnar Solskjaer running the length of the pitch to inconvenience Rob Lee — can amuse when, as in that example, there's a certain lucidity and self-awareness to proceedings. When the inherent cynicism is pushed into the realms of chutzpah; when the protagonist is almost daring the referee to do what he should. As for the latter, well, that depends on who is involved. Ten minutes into a Cup game against Chelsea, an unjust dismissal for Plucky Lowerleague-Leftback would be no fun at all. The same dismissal for, say, Manchester United's Chris Smalling would split sides up and down the land.
But the one that is always funny, assuming no personal involvement in the result or particular regard for the spectacle, is the stupid red card. Footballers doing inexplicably silly things is always life-affirming — at times, even the very best have no idea what they’re doing — and here, that silliness begets the strange pantomime of the issuing of the card and all that follows. The morose trudge from the field, past the blank, stony face of the manager. The cascade of abuse within the stadium and the bafflement from the commentators. The creased brows and shaking heads of teammates. And finally, usually unseen but always implied, hanging over the rest of proceedings, the knowledge that the dispatched player is just sitting there, alone in the dressing room, slowly unwinding the tape from their socks, maybe kicking a water bottle around, hoping against all logic that this moment of ridiculousness stays just that, ridiculous, that it doesn’t become important.
Footballers doing inexplicably silly things is always life-affirming
On this front, so far, the Premier League has been doing okay. We've had two second yellow cards, Philippe Coutinho for Liverpool and Stephen Whittaker for Norwich, that have been fairly straightforward in themselves, yet have come shortly after the first yellow card was received for the terribly important business of obstructing a set piece. We've had John Terry reaping the natural rewards of being just as John Terry as ever, just slightly slower, and we've had Thibaut Courtois' failed star jump. We've had Ibrahim Afellay getting gently slapped in the face, trying to return the favour, failing, then jumping to his feet to have another go.
And we’ve had West Ham. Three in the league, a fourth overturned, and another three in the Europa League. While none have been particularly amusing in their own right, the weight of accumulation has been entertainingly peculiar, as though Slaven Bilic had arrived in England not from Turkey but from an alternative universe where football’s early rule-makers had decided not to outlaw hacking. Perhaps we can blame the lingering trauma of taking the second half of last season off, only to find themselves forced into an early European campaign. Come on, lads! For the club! For Bobby Moore! We’ll never top this Fair Play league again!
So there have been a few good, solid, six- or seven-out-of-ten stupidities. Nothing great yet, though; nothing on a par with Youssuf Mulumbu punting the ball into a bemused Gary O’Neil, or Javier Mascherano getting so angry with the very concept of Steve Bennett that he got himself sent off. Before half time. For dissent.
Which is why this international break was so gallingly timed. Things were just teetering on the edge of proper nonsense, and then everybody got to go away for a fortnight and clear their heads. Take Aleksandr Mitrovic, who arrived in the Premier League with something of a bang, collecting two yellows and a red in 127 minutes of football. Thanks to the break, he got to slap on a novelty t-shirt, join up with his national team, and play a friendly against France. He scored. He didn’t even get booked. We can only imagine, in blank horror, what such pleasing normality may have done to his chances of getting sent off after seventeen minutes on Saturday.
You could perhaps argue that stupid red cards aren't causally related to one another; that some silliness one week doesn't increase the chance of more and bigger the next. And that is perhaps (probably) true. But oh, what if they are. What we might have lost. What we might have gained, had the Premier League only just plowed on, relentless and unstopping, each dismissal piling onto and over the last. Samir Nasri, setting fire to a corner flag. Jonjo Shelvey, dirty protesting in the opposition dugout. Wayne Rooney, stamping on his own testicles.
Ultimately, we can only hope that whatever strangeness has been driving the numbers so far has survived the internationals. Otherwise, well, it’ll be just be something else to lay at Roy Hodgson’s feet. It’s not enough, apparently, that he sucks the fun out of all the matches he oversees. He’s started draining the fun from the future, too. For f--ks sake, Roy.
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