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Sometimes it’s OK not to know everything about the Premier League


There are thing in your life that, generally speaking, require a great deal of attention and examination. These are the most meaningful parts of your life, either because they are hugely terrible, enormously positive, significant, or just because they are such rare occurrences. Some examples, then. The death of a parent is to most people a fundamental change in their life. Given the generally slow decline of the elderly in the United Kingdom, there is a good chance that sons and daughters often have the chance to witness their last breaths. Most births, marriages and deaths fit into this category, events that can’t be disregarded.

Then there are the events which have a novelty value. The time you walk into a glass door and cut the flip out of your arm, leaving a scar for life. Getting into a particular industry that you’ve always wanted to be part of, feels like a huge achievement, until you realise it is all repetition and drudgery, just as any job is. But we should not worry that these peaks and troughs are - for most people - intermittent, with plenty of gray and filler to take up the spaces in between. Eating crisps while sitting in your pants for three days straight is not a waste of time, it is necessary respite.

It seems as if the Premier League doen’t subscribe to a similar philosophy. We can all see it doesn’t serve up relentless excitement, but all that is around it seems to insist that what we are watching is the equivalent of earth shattering excitement, even if Middlesbrough or David Moyes are present. It’s not a new point to make that Sky and BT go overboard in their professed opinion that football matches on television is the greatest thing to happen to anyone, ever, since sliced bread was immaculately conceived, but it is still worth mentioning from time to time.

If you consider that football really is so consistently amazing, then it is worth examining how BT and Sky reward you for paying the monthly fees to enjoy it. Your reward, beyond the games themselves, is Jamie Redknapp, Michael Owen, Jake Humphrey, some bloggers, and Fletch and Sav. Either the sport really is amazing, or it gets the pundits it deserves. It is not hard to work out which might be the underlying truth.

And that is largely fine, if you are content to enjoy football on television for what it should probably entail. Of course, everyone is free to get whatever they want out of it, but it is best suited to two hours of escapism and entertainment. More tribally, it might be a source of joy and frustration. But football is now, literally, a quotidian event, like eating breakfast or self-hatred. Once you’ve eaten one fried egg, you’ve eaten them all. Once you’ve been filled with general regret the morning after going out, you’ve more or less got the hang of being an adult. Those births, marriages and deaths are still spaced out. And in football, the moments of real importance are kept irregular.

It’s not really Sky or BT’s fault that they can’t offer us what they promise. They can alter the promise, obviously, but not the product. A league competition, by design, matters more once most of the matches have been played. So for most of the season, and most of the teams, goals scored after 30 passes or goals scored from 30 yards are in a context vacuum. Do the goals matter? Well, it’s not really possible to say until it all gets added up at the end. There are building sub-plots, but they probably don’t deserve fireworks on pitchside. Chris Smalling’s waxing and waning isn’t quite as nourishing as Christopher Moltisanti’s intermittent and ultimate decline, but that’s because football is random and slow.

There are exceptions to this. Paolo Di Canio pushed over a referee in a slapstick fashion. Eric Cantona decided to kick a hooligan in the face. Luis Suarez became a racist. George Grahm took bungs. Alan Shearer joined Newcastle United and became a hero. All these are valuable and remarkable because they are rare (at least, we can hope open racism in the Premier League remains rare, but there’s no point getting our hopes up). These are the things that deserve headlines, analysis and reaction. So does a Cristiano Ronaldo goal, a Sergio Aguero masterpiece of finishing, and the potential excellence of Hector Bellerin. All have a mixture of quality and rarity.

What is weird, though, is the apparent necessity to take from these events some kind of definitive opinion. Nine league games have passed, and yet we are told that some things just are. Five games ago, Pep Guardiola was the best manager in the world, on the cusp of redefining excellence in the Premier League - one rube hack even claimed he had seen the best Premier League 45-minte performance ever under this Guardiola side. Now, he can’t hack the rigours of English football and is being shown the limitations of his fancy-dan ways.

It hasn’t stopped there. Paul Pogba is a fraud, and Jose Mourinho has lost whatever he had that made him brilliant. One of them didn’t have a pre-season and is playing in a team of jokers, and the other is trying to put right the three years that made Manchester United that team of jokers. Zlatan Ibrahimovic can’t hack the step up from Ligue 1.

There are Spurs fans getting antsy that they don’t have enough squad depth. There are Arsenal fans proclaiming the new maturity of Theo Walcott, backed by the ‘world class’ Mesut Ozil behind him.

Some of these opinions will end up being correct. Others will end up making the holder look foolish. Nobody will remember the losing ideas they have, but they’ll invest heavily in remembering where they are right. Something has to fill the grey, indifferent spaces in life and that might as well be football’s use. But there is an ersatz importance placed on each moment, and a rush to judgement on everything that has happened. But we have had nine games. Nine games. Yet most players haven’t had nine games. Most managers won’t know their best teams. Football is there to be enjoyed, but we would probably be less exhausted if we remembered it is a slow burn to keep an eye on for now, and the obsession can wait for the last two months.