Some lovely goals in the Premier League this weekend. But which, according to our highly subjective and profoundly unfair criteria, were the three best? Glad you asked ...
Matt Ritchie’s thunderbolt is the Alternative EPL Goal of the Week
A long range stunner, and beautiful team goal and a heartwarming story. The Premier League has been spoiling us this week.
Tony Marshall/Getty Images
This one is all about the buildup. Before Juan Mata passed the ball into the net, Manchester United strung together 44 passes over more than two minutes, covering most of the field and involving every outfield player bar Anthony Martial. Now, on the one hand that is fairly remarkable, particularly from a team featuring Wayne Rooney and his aching, throbbing, tender first touch.
On the other, there's always been something slightly prog-rock-like about goals like this. An exceptional technical achievement -- yes, fine, absolutely -- but not, when you really nail it down, all that thrilling. Up one wing, back down the same wing, across the back four, up the other wing, back down, across the back four again, up the first wing another time, back again, across the back four a third time, into midfield for a bit, back to the defense again ... presumably, all this is only retrospectively exciting. If, say, around pass 34, Chris Smalling had accidentally kicked the ball into the river Itchen, then the whole exercise would have been written off as just another exercise in Louis van Gaal's philosophy of sterile domination.
Ah, but it wasn’t sterile domination, was it? Because United scored. Just about. Though they nearly got that bit wrong, when Memphis Depay -- having done excellently to escape his marker -- sent his shot into the post. Which brings us to the other problem: this wasn’t a 44-pass goal. This was a 44-pass miss, then a rebound. Or do we count that as No. 45, a wall-pass off the post?
Excessive pedantry and misery, perhaps. It was a nice goal. And the Match of the Day 2 pundits were very impressed. Mesmerizing, said either Martin Keown or Mark Lawrenson. Hypnotizing, said the other one. We never had them down as System of a Down fans, but life is full of surprises.
Bojan! With your smile like the sun appearing from behind a cloud! With your face like a lost sheep! With your knee that last season exploded like an egg in the microwave! Bojan!
Serious injuries, the kind that require not just rest and recovery but some measure of rebuilding, are horrible bastards. For a start, there’s so much can go wrong, and for an end, even when everything seems to have gone right, you never know quite what’s going to happen to the player. Maybe they’ll have lost a little pace -- not a huge amount, just the different between brilliant and ordinary.
Or maybe something else will have gone snap at the same time, something in the brain, something that can’t be stitched back together. Maybe they’ll have lost trust in their own body. That last fear is particularly sharp when it comes to a player like Bojan Krkic, whose curious career has, one can only assume, inflicted quite a psychological toll over the years.
After failing to make a smooth progression from Barcelona prospect to Barcelona fixture, he became kind of journeyman riddle, passed around Europe’s big clubs, all of whom took a look at him, shook their heads and moved him on to somebody else.
Eventually he found his way to the mid-table of the Premier League, where it turned out that all he needed was a little less pressure, a little more freedom and the vinegary stylings of Mark Hughes, perhaps the least Bojan-like person in the universe. It was all going so well. And then his anterior cruciate ligament went pop.
But he’s back! He started! And after 13 minutes, when Marko Arnautovic slid a through ball into the space behind Leicester City’s defense, he scored! A simple chance, yes, but one taken confidently and celebrated joyously. Bojan! It’s still really, really weird that you play for Stoke.
Matt Ritchie, Bournemouth vs. Sunderland
One of the great tragedies of football is that it doesn’t involve much wood. Even the woodwork is proverbial and made of metal. This is a shame because wood, among its many virtues, is a fine producer of fine sounds. Think of the noise of a perfectly timed pull shot or, for any Americans out there, a home run caught right at the perfect moment, if anybody uses wooden bats any more. It’s a sound that instantly communicates the purity of the strike, even before the eye reports back that yes, the ball’s gone to exactly the right place at exactly the right speed.
Matt Ritchie's goal against Sunderland was the footballing equivalent. A dipping, slashed volley that hammered through the air into the top corner of the goal, that left a comic book arc of flame trailing in its wake. A goal that everybody has dreamed of scoring at least once, a goal that normally, when attempted, ends up with the ball flying off at a peculiar angle and everybody in the crowd shouting "Weeeeey!" An absolute belter, in other words, and probably the early frontrunner for goal of the season, assuming Arsenal fans don't nobble the poll again.
But no appropriate sound. Football just doesn’t have them, these wooden tocs, the sporting equivalent of a flicked wine glass, singing out over the murmur of a crowded room. Or a tolling bell, sonorous and deep. Or a frying pan applied, carefully and precisely, to a face. The best that our poor sport can manage is a dull smack of ultra-modern pseudo-leather on ultra-modern pseudo-leather, interspersed with the occasional clang of the post. Ah well. Maybe they should all wear clogs. It’s still a lovely hit.
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