Arsenal and Liverpool will fix their defenses, but watching them was still really funny

Meet the new Premier League. Same as the old Premier League.

On Friday night, Arsenal welcomed the world and Leicester City to the Emirates Stadium. Always obliging hosts, they laid on a feast of miserable defending, conceding three textbook oh, Arsenal goals. In the end, they needed Leicester to bottle it and Olivier Giroud to put his massive head on it to grab a 4-3 victory.

Then, on Saturday lunchtime, Liverpool picked up where the Londoners had left off. Except they got their timings all wrong: Where Arsenal were clever enough to put the comeback after the brainfade, and so end up with three points and the freedom to laugh at themselves, Jürgen Klopp’s side had the comeback early on, and so left space for one last cock-up at the very end. They drew 3-3.

Both games were, first and foremost, very funny. And both were very on brand for a league that prides itself in a kind of chaotic egalitarianism, at least in the moment-to-moment. Sure, at the end of the season, the teams will probably end up roughly in wallet-size order. But everybody will have been involved in something nonsensical along the way. That’s what good television is all about.

But when it comes to the important business of measuring a team’s actual ability, the very first games of a new season exist in a kind of strange limbo. If a team plays well, then: hooray! They’ve had a great summer, they’ve got themselves sorted — onward to victories, to happiness, to nobody getting sacked.

And if they play badly? It’s fine! Because there’s still plenty of time to sort things out.

Take Liverpool. They can’t defend. Some of their individual defenders are far too prone to making bad decisions, and as a unit they are critically negligent when it comes to picking players up at set pieces. We knew this already.

But all the people in charge of Liverpool know this too, and we know that they know this. They had to formally apologise for tapping up Virgil van Dijk, after all, and they weren’t doing so just because they thought it might be funny. Now, presumably, they’re awkwardly shuffling around trying to pick the perfect moment to lean back in and restart the conversation. “Since we’re already talking about it — and yes, we’re really sorry, we can’t apologise enough — how much?”

Now take Arsenal. They can’t defend either, and were exposed twice from set pieces and once on the break. But they almost certainly aren’t planning to spend the entire season trying to defend with two left-backs and Rob Holding. Club captain Per Mertesacker and vice-captain Laurent Koscielny will return in short order, and while this may not solve the problem completely — one’s old and slow, the other’s semi-permacrocked, and Arsenal gonna Arsenal — we need to at least see Arsenal failing at full strength before we can truly point and laugh.

In part, this is the knock-on effect of the transfer window staying open until the beginning of September. There is still time for teams to get their business done, to respond to an early injury, or to panic and splurge millions of pounds all over the place in a desperate attempt to fix everything in a couple of weeks. Sometimes that last approach even works: On the last day of last summer, Chelsea brought in David Luiz and Marcos Alonso, and that didn’t turn out too badly.

More generally, the early weeks of the season can be thought of as a kind of testing laboratory. No tactical plan ever survived first contact with Tony Pulis, after all, and this is the time when football managers find out whether all their theorising and preseason planning has been fruitful. Again, last season’s Chelsea are instructive here. Three games into the season, they bought big. Six games in, they changed formation and personnel. And 30-odd games later, they won the thing.

So while Arsenal and Liverpool would doubtless like to have started their campaign with clean sheets, their respective calamities need not be the theme for the campaign. If Liverpool can get their man out of Southampton, and maybe lose Alberto Moreno down the back of the sofa, then they should get better. And if Arsenal can get their squad fit — no, bear with us — then perhaps their defence will — no, no, don’t giggle — manage … oh, fine. Fine. Laugh away.

But this is the joy of early season. When things go well, it’s amazing; when things go badly, there’s still hope. Nothing disastrous is certain, and anything is possible. Even competence.