Tactically Naive: The Premier League is at war with time itself

Hello and welcome to another instalment of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. Kicking the Nike Ordem of information into Row Z of entertainment.

It was Derby Weekend in the Premier League, and something very strange happened. On Saturday, Arsenal played Tottenham, and it was fun.

That’s not the strange thing: these games are often quite fun. There’s a weird energy to the north London derby, a kind of proud desperation. Perhaps it’s because both clubs are understood to possess an inherent and fundamental vulnerability. It’s Oh, Arsenal against Spursiness, the inversion of Alien vs. Predator. Whoever loses, everybody else wins.

Anyway, nobody won. Arsenal were probably the better team, but Spurs took advantage of their soft penalty while Arsenal wasted theirs, so both sides had to be unhappy with a point. Video replays of the Spurs penalty have sparked a three-days-and-counting argument about tiny wrinkles in the offside rule ... but that’s not strange either. Good thing VAR will be along shortly to sort all this out.

No, the strange thing was that the game rattled past in about half an hour. Oh sure, the clock said 90 minutes had passed, and the players all looked appropriately knackered. But as soon as Tactically Naive sat down it seemed to be half time. And we’d barely finished entering the half-time tactical tweaks into the SBN supercomputer before the final whistle blew.

The game was thrown into the sharp relief by the second instalment of Derby Weekend, Liverpool’s trip to Everton. (No, west London. Chelsea vs. Fulham doesn’t count. Mostly because west London isn’t real.) In some parts of the country, this game — a taut, tense 0-0 — took about four hours to complete in some parts of the country. In others, it is still going on.

Liverpool aren’t going to score, mind. Nobody need worry.

At first, TN assumed that this was just proof of the old cliche: time walks really, really slowly when you’re not having fun. But as we sat there, watching Liverpool miscalculate long passes, and Everton miscontrol short ones, we started to wonder about that. Why would our brains do that to us? Have the fun things fly by while the dull ones drag? What kind of a way is that to organise our experience of the world?

A convenient one, if you’re the Premier League. You might think that football’s noisiest competition would want the opposite: the fun games to last for ages and the dull ones to slide unobtrusively by. But that would underestimate the cynicism at play here. The point of the Premier League isn’t to deliver good wholesome fun to the fans. It’s to maximise the time spent looking at football while not actually looking at football.

Fun soccer games are, for modern football administrators, a disaster. Every second spent on actually enjoying the actual football is one not spent in quiet contemplation of the various brands who have paid good money for access to your eyeballs. As an illustration of this principle, TN cannot recall a single advert that happened during the north London derby. There was just too much going on.

Yet by the time Liverpool and Everton ticked into the seventh hour, we’d spent every single euro we could scrape together on fresh, hot Rainham Steel.

Anyway, we can’t prove that the Premier League is, as part of their business plan, somehow interfering with our perception of time. We have no evidence that they are manipulating the pattern, stretching and spinning it out on some vast loom. Clipping off minutes here, weaving in hours there, looping us back on ourselves in endless recursive motifs; we can’t substantiate any of that. And if they are trapping us inside 0-0 draws for months at a time, we don’t have the receipts.

But we can’t prove that they’re not doing any of that, either. And that’s extremely suspicious.

Ooooh, it’s Champions League time again. Let’s check in with how all of the continent’s greatest teams got on this weekend ahead of the second legs of the last sixteen.

In England: Manchester City’s most important player is injured. Manchester United’s most important, like, nine or 10 players are injured. Liverpool only score goals against Watford now. And Spurs have even less of a midfield than when they had no midfield.

Oh.

In Italy: Roma just lost the derby 3-0. Elsewhere, Cristiano Ronaldo didn’t score for Juventus, but did have a row with Max Allegri.

In France: Both Lyon and Paris Saint-Germain had their weekend results overshadowed by a man taking a short video of himself. Love you, Mario.

In Germany: You know how Borussia Dortmund were leading the Bundesliga by seven points? Now they’re leading it by two goals. But Bayern Munich are looking good again! Hooray! Hooray?

Also Schalke lost. One of the 16 best teams in Europe. One of the 14 best teams in Germany. It’s a silly game.

In Spain: Clásico, Barcelona win, Real Madrid lose, fine. Whatever. Much more important was a win for Atlético Madrid — a.k.a. the People’s Champions League Champions, a.k.a. the Only Acceptable, Realistic Winners Left In The Competition. Come on, Álvaro Morata. Do it for the narrative. Do it for angry Diego.

In the Netherlands: Actually, Ajax winning would be pretty cool too. Hopefully their 6-0 win over indie platformer VVVVVV will set them up nicely to play Real Madrid.

In Portugal: Every season, TN promises ourselves we’ll make a proper effort to follow the Primeira Liga. It’ll be fun, we think. We’ll get a look at a load of exciting players who will eventually sign for Wolves, we think. And every season, without fail, we fail.

It appears that we’re missing out on some wonderfully miserable defending. Look at the first goal here. One, two, three professional footballers, all quite good in theory, all transmuted into clowns wearing their giant shoes on the wrong feet.

Later on in the game, Benfica’s Gabriel Appelt got himself sent off for two bookable offences in the space of two seconds. First he tried to pull an opponent’s shorts off. Then, when the opponent had the cheek to complain, he pushed him to the ground. Just tremendous work all round. Next season, Portugal. Next season.