Hello, and welcome to Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. Happy new year, one and all.
Tactically Naive: The Premier League’s biggest moments you may have missed over Christmas
Do the Christmas Premier League matches feel like a fog? Get caught up, starting with — oh, Arsenal, no.
One great big festive smear
If you watch English football on television over Christmas, as is tradition, then you’ll recognize the point when thing start to get messy.
Orderly footballing reality collapses under the twin pressures of an overloaded calendar and a nation that’s temporarily uncoupled from the working week. Add to that the merry havoc of television scheduling, and you end up with a weird sense of gluttonous dislocation.
For there is always football happening. You’re never quite sure what it is. You’ve got a sneaking suspicion that the football you actually wanted to watch was yesterday, or maybe tomorrow. Or maybe this was it, but you’d imagined it to be different, somehow. Bigger. More important. Ah well, there’ll be another along in a minute.
If only there was some kind of parallel with Christmas that we could draw here. Wouldn’t that be useful?
Anyway, for those of you who lost track of things over the break, here’s a quick summary of all the stuff that happened in the Premier League:
- Liverpool won the league nice and early, giving everybody time to transition over to other sports/leave the country/delete Twitter before they win the league officially.
- VAR continued to make the case that the only thing more annoying than an incorrect offside decision is a five-minute break before a correct offside decision (and honestly, it’s been quite interesting discovering this).
- Chelsea lost home games against Southampton and Bournemouth, but won away games against Tottenham and Arsenal, proving that nobody is as committed to bragging rights as Frank Lampard.
- Speaking of Arsenal, they managed to look like they were making actual progress against Chelsea before it all went very, very oh Arsenal. First a goalkeeping howler, then a sudden outbreak of defensive narcolepsy. Mikel Arteta must feel right at home.
- Manchester United managed two convincing wins against teams that they should be beating convincingly, which might not sound like much but that’s pretty good going for this season. Also Marcus Rashford managed to outfox a defender by unexpectedly falling over, then toe-poking the ball home with his wrong foot, so that was good.
- In ambitious football news, Sheffield United and Wolves are still great fun, which is excellent. But Norwich are still doomed, which is sad.
And while most of you know this, there’s a decent chance that somebody has managed to miss the news, so: Carlo Ancelotti manages Everton now. Yes, that Carlo Ancelotti. Yes, it does look a bit weird. But Tactically Naive reckons it’s going to be pretty sweet for a while, so that’ll be nice. Dominic Calvert-Lewin even scores goals now. It’s a whole thing.
The Moyes is back in town
”Pleased”?
Tactically Naive has watched this announcement clip about 100 times now, and we cannot get enough of it. We don’t know whose decision it was to present David Moyes as if he were the killer in a prestige East End Noir television series, but we would like to shake them by the hand.
It is simply, precisely, and beautifully perfect, expressing in just a few short seconds how every part of this appointment feels about every other part. West Ham the club, West Ham’s fans, David Moyes the manager; all consumed with utter weariness at the fact that this is happening. Again.
You can kind of see what they were going for: here is a serious man to do a serious task at a serious club. But West Ham are not a serious club; they are a rolling series of badly organised crises overseen by owners who either don’t know what they’re doing, or don’t care. And David Moyes is not a serious man. Not any more. Not since he was over-promoted into a fugue state.
This is not to say that seriousness is beyond either party in the future; anything is possible. It’s just that this is not where they are right now. And so, as the head turns, and the mouth doesn’t smile, and the snow — Dandruff? Ash? Post-nuclear explosion detritus? — drifts about in embarrassment, all the viewer can think is “huh, he looks a bit like Hugh Laurie’s less successful brother”.
A polite reminder, as New Year approaches, that calendar year records in European football are complete nonsense
We know, we know. It’s a natural tendency. The big number on the calendar flips over, everybody starts making resolutions, and so it’s time to count things up.
Did you know that in 2019, 35 percent of Liverpool’s goals have come from the left foot of a Scorpio who was worried that they’d left the gas on? That’s 12 percent more than anybody else!
But, well, think about how the season works. Seasons, plural. There’s a massive great break in the middle. All sorts of things happen in that break: teams get relegated and promoted, players arrive and depart, managers change (and even when they don’t, plans do). Seasons get moved forwards and backwards to make space for summer tournaments. And even if one team doesn’t change much, everybody else shifts around them.
It turns out 2019, for a football team following the European calendar, wasn’t one thing. It was half of one thing, and half of something else, and only a mathematician or a monster would ignore that.
Everybody loves a good stat. But let’s be honest about what these records are: miserable, ill-formed chimeras; offences against nature and God; Frankensteinian abominations. The back half of one season stitched to the front half of the next, lurching around the internet in grotesque parody and scaring the children. Stop it. You all know better.
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