A Tale of Two Manchesters, & Other Stories
Image courtesy of @ManCity
A quite rambunctious start for — yes — Tottenham Hotspur
For all the bluster around Tottenham’s business in the transfer market, it’s actually been a summer of incremental growth. Antonio Conte’s starting lineup on Saturday didn’t include a single one of the club’s shiny and not-so-shiny new signings. This indicates the manager has had real time to bake in his philosophy, and that he will give last season’s starters the opportunity to lose their places in the match-day eleven.
From the three most likely to do so, there were encouraging signs. Ryan Sessegnon looked more willing to bombard the opposing third, and might have resurfaced with two goals had a clinical second finish not been flagged offside. Emerson Royal, gamely acknowledging a weakness in his crossing, was acute and aware in several series of short-pass interplay, turning the right flank into a sort of mini-midfield. Pierre-Emile Hølberg proved he’s still willing to run right through your dad and the groceries, as long as you don’t run him all the way into the ground. (Say hi to Satan, Mr. Mourinho.) I could venture there was a fourth man with things to prove Saturday at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, given that the club remains linked to the mouth-watering prospect of an attacking midfielder to complicate Conte’s brusque offensive regimen.
I’m sure you’ve seen the shirts by now: Dejan Kulusevski was in fact Kulusexy. In Conte’s counter-press, and in Pep Guardiola’s possession-based build-up, I have noticed the tiniest distinction from gegenpressing and Bielsa Ball. The latter makes the on-ball player part of a moving triangle, whereas the former a quadrangle — in calling for both a wing-back and a central defender to advance at roughly the same time. (Virgil Van Dijk will sometimes apply a noggin to corners, but that’s about it. In Klopp’s Dortmund side Mats Hummels brought the ball up, sure, but wasn’t necessarily expected to help complete attacking sequences.) Every time Kulusevski and Royal declared a stick-up in the corner, it was Cristian Romero on hand to provide an outlet or even some sort of ball over the top. This was so prevalent, and so effective at creating danger, that both Son Heung-Min and Harry Kane essentially found themselves marooned on the opposite end of the penalty box.
But it was Kulusevski, I repeat, that brought the Kulusexiness. His cuts inside were awkward for Southampton to deal with because he often had those three passing options — Royal constantly, Romero a lot, and any one of multiple bodies in the box. His cunning, however, is he seems to never opt for the easy ball, purchasing time and space with a combination of brute strength and balletic balance that honestly is Zlatan-esque if not Kulusexual.
I’m sorry. I’ll show myself out. I left a couple nickname suggestions for Rodrigo Bentancur (The Voice of Reason) and James Ward-Prowse (That Bastard!) on the refrigerator, thanks.
The post-Mané era begins on Merseyside.
A polite message to all the Tottenham faithful: please do stop it with the bants about Kulusevski being worlds better than Luis Diaz. (Maybe three worlds, but not loads.) I love the Portuguese demon’s directness, and honestly think the very slight upgrade (from Sadio Mané) was as smooth and efficient as the one I’ve just conducted onto an M1 Air. (I love this keyboard so much I’ll gladly transcribe the Ts and Cs of that dating app you just downloaded.)
Mané was by all accounts a trooper, but by some others a bit of a discontent in the locker room. To fetch 40-odd-million dollars for a 30-year old (whose core value is his speed) is neat commerce by Liverpool. So I for one thought all the pre-season talk of a difficult transition, towards a Diaz era and the poaching approach of lanky Darwin Nunez, was absolute guff.
Yes and no. Either Mané was really good at generating a frequency of shots on goal, or Fulham just weren’t having any on their first day out on the park. I also wonder if Mané, even by me, was all this time underrated as a finisher and specifically a top bins curler of the football. Nevertheless, Liverpool only ever give themselves first world problems: Nunez completely altered the complexion of the frontline when he came on, not least by energising Mo Salah’s presence in the box. This is also a team that can count on the relief services of Diogo Jota, whose contract Liverpool have quietly extended.
Next season they will convince some foolish enterprise — I estimate one based in Paris, London or Barcelona — to pay them solid money for Roberto Firminho. Everything’s under control up there.
A Tale of Two Manchesters
I spent much of Sunday trying to convince Patty from Production that Erik Ten Hag’s actually got this. He’s not barreling in swinging the axe, because like any good coach he wants to try and establish a training ground meritocracy. When Michael Owen re-iterated my sentiments, that there was no urgent need for a personnel teardown, I said I was reminded (by our telepathic synchronicity) of why I’d so adored Owen as an 11-year old marauder.
And then Brighton went two up.
I don’t know what’s worse if you’re Manchester United: that the very best player on your team is 37, or that he wants out, or that he can prove in little over 30 minutes that your side doesn’t have comparable talent. Paul Pogba is on a dinghy in short shorts in coastal France, no doubt, laughing. As soon as the visitors got a second one in, United’s heads all dropped with alarming uniformity. Everyone except Ronaldo looked like they had diarrhoea, and like they’d been told the plumbing would be shot for several hours so could everyone just try and hold it please.
The trouble with a wholesale personnel teardown, which Patty and many other United fans are foaming at the mouth for, is it’s usually a mistake to bring several fresh faces into a non-existent culture. (Let alone that you can’t even attract the best faces.) The sad truth of United’s situation is it appears to start with the ownership, and the Glazers have recently convinced themselves they aren’t half-bad at winning. They will never sell, and the Premier League doesn’t strike me as being the kind of owners’ club that would force a terrible member to bail for the good of the product.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d honestly rather be Barcelona. At least they fire up the freaking gun.
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The correct term for what Erling Braut Haaland does to a football is ‘thunderfuck’.
This is the moment I informed Coco-Pop that the Striking Viking was already the 2nd-best pure striker of the ball in the world. How can such a large gentleman have everything: positional awareness, precise passing, devilish acceleration, and the ability to smack a ball with that much power and so little pull-back?
After an hour of City’s visit to West Ham, it was neither bold nor that original to compare the Kevin De Bruyne-to-Haaland link-up to a very specific brand of pornographic experience. For City’s and Haaland’s second goal, the Norwegian takes off a full calendar year before the Hammers’ defence is remotely aware what’s happening, but still stays onside. Haaland will never be the distributor Harry Kane is, and isn’t quite the Hogwarts graduate that is Kylian Mbappé — but that’s because he’s fucking Thanos.
I would have liked to see West Ham put up a battle, especially once they had the equally towering, infinitely tattooed Gianluca Scamacca on the field. But there was never much of a response, because West Ham (again) have wasted their summer on theory. City had loads of time on the ball, and looked slightly worse for offloading Raheem Sterling when Jack Grealish was their primary wing threat. He and his hair were such a delight to watch at Villa, when his twinkle toes seemed wholly capable of carrying him all the way to Valhalla. Too often at City, Grealish tries to play outside his defender, and then re-enforcements (actually) undermine any subsequent attempts to pull magic out his arse.
But, Gawd, Manchester City. That Alvarez lad looks a right player, a polar opposite of Haaland but a lab-made replica of Kun Aguero. Not only can he take a ball down, before he sashays into shooting form for his preferred foot — he can bop Kurt Zouma right in the face, on behalf of cat-lovers everywhere.
It’s going to be a long and mostly entertaining season, but only for two and a half teams.
