I want to talk about some facts. Football is great apart from when it’s quite boring, and the 2014/15 Premier League season was the dullest yet. You can decide for yourself. I am not playing mind games, just facts. Poor quality combined with a total lack of competition for the title is not the stuff to live long in the memory. City looked like they couldn’t be arsed, yet still managed to finish second; Arsenal found a run of good form in the league at the most meaningless time possible; United became the dullest yet frustratingly effective team in the league; and, Liverpool and Spurs decided to finish their seasons in March and take the final two months off. Like I said, these are just facts.
The final insult was Sky’s hilarious attempt to sustain our interest by hyping up the final couple of weeks as a crucial period, even though pretty much everything had been decided. Even the relegation ‘battle’ was an anti-climax, with Hull just that bit too shit to find any form despite Newcastle refusing to win any games for about four months. Not every season will be a classic, which is fine, but during fallow periods it helps if there is something to distract you from the tedium. What the Premier League lacks at present is genuine rivalries among the bigger clubs that dominate media coverage. In short, it lacks hatred.
Chelsea were there to be hated. They had the league’s biggest bastard in Costa, and the most loathed player in Terry. Mourinho fired off some of his trademark snide soundbites, but it all felt a little bit forced. It was as though he felt compelled to live up to his billing as the Goad King, but couldn’t find any worthy targets to make his efforts remotely satisfying.
Nostalgia’s a bastard – it makes all sorts of things seem better than they were, and it turns you into one of those boring old bastards who tells everyone how shit everything is these days. But, [boring old bastard alert] at least when United and Arsenal were going at it (in the late 90’s and early 00’s) you knew it really, really mattered, to the players and to the fans. It wasn’t just those two, either. Rafa Benitez was wound so tighten he wrote his own list of ‘facts’ about Alex Ferguson. Let’s think about the state of mind of a manager who compiles evidence against his nemesis, then presents it a press conference. If he’d been calm, he’d have thought it through and realised that it was a terrible idea, making him look weak and desperate. There’s been nothing since to suggest Benitez is that highly strung, so the motivation must have been fuelled by anger that got the better of him.
Of course, the common factor here is Lord Mind Games himself. It always struck me that the mind games thing was overplayed. It basically amounted to Fergie saying, “See that team, managed by him? They’re not so great”. It’s the kind of psychological sniping a six year-old would find basic, but the pressure of football does remarkable things to people, and before you know it you’re screaming “THAT BASTARD’S NOT COMING TO MY BIRTHDAY PARTY!” at Gabriel Clarke or whoever the fuck does the interviews.
The more this happens, the greater the supply of simmering resentment that frequently boils over into naked enmity. We had Keane offering Viera out for a fight; the Battle of the Buffet; and Keown turning into a baboon before our eyes. These things may have been ridiculous but they made those games absolutely essential viewing. And, it meant that whoever won the league felt had to really earn it.
What do we have now? Jack Wilshere sings a song about Spurs being shit and it’s reported like he’s punched a child in the face. I never thought I’d be in Wilshere’s corner, but at least he gives the fans a chance to believe the rivalry matters to the players, too. Wilshere will likely receive horrific abuse at White Hart Lane next season (if he’s fit). It’ll be interesting to see how he handles it. But, what we really need is rivalry among teams going for titles. And, for that it seems we will have to wait.
