We won’t report you if you tell him where to get off.
The opening day of the new football season is like an extremely demanding child that wants your attention when you’re not ready for it.
Maybe you’re still on holiday, or just about to go away, or enjoying other people being away, or enjoying the cricket instead, or the transfer gossip, or simply vacating your brain for its seasonal shut down.
But you’re not quite ready for football, and want to tell the demanding child to go away. But he doesn’t and slowly you let him tug your sleeve and whine and be in your face. Even though he makes you wince each time he opens his mouth, eventually, when nobody’s looking, you finally give in to his demands and let him have his way.
In your defence you never stood much of a chance. Not only is he an extremely demanding child, but this season he’s also an extremely spoilt one.
In fact he’s a real trustafarian, with more money than it would take to air condition the entire kingdom of Qatar, let alone a few football stadia. A child so rich that he nonchalantly talks of spending £17m on a striker, even when the club in question belongs to Stoke City.
And like all spoilt rich kids he tends to get heard. Which is why to know nothing at all about the Rooney transfer saga, or where Suarez will end up, or the approximate price of Spurs’ Euro Bale-out, is now practically impossible. Your plane would have had to come down somewhere incredibly remote to be that much in the dark about football matters these days.
Geographically there’s probably nowhere left to hide from the Premier League any more. After all, the pundits have multiplied like Mormon missionaries, with Gary and Gary and Phil and Lawro and Jamie and Alan practically everywhere, all wearing the same shiny suits, teeth and tans, and all bearing a look that they know something we don’t.
“WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING”
The problem is they know nothing more than we all know. Which is that about 30 games of the new season will end up goalless. That 70 more matches will be won by only one goal. 95 will have 2 goals, 80 will see the net bulge 3 times, 55 will have 4 goals and a bedazzling 50 games will have 5 or more by the end of whatever replaces Fergie time.
After years spent mucking about with football data this is the sum total of proven knowledge about what will most likely happen during the next 8 months of the Premiership season.
The promoters of the season ahead would have us believe that despite all the certainty this could be the most unpredictable league ever staged. The return from exile of you-know-who, the de-throning of the Old Trafford dug-out and the arrival of an Eastwoodesque hispanic at the Etihad (who has quietly stepped off the street and into the saloon bar whilst everyone else was squaring up), are being touted as ingredients for a memorable campaign. A Special Season, as they might say at Stamford Bridge.
In which case there’s probably all the more reason to doubt them.
In 12 months time we could be looking back at the year everyone choked and Hull City Tigers became champions. We might be celebrating Joey Barton as footballer of the year and Joe Kinnear could yet end up receiving the keys to the Toon. Hell, we might even be celebrating the fact that against all the odds our boys made it to Brazil and failed to embarrass themselves, missing out by the width of a Copacabana beach thong on a place in the semi-finals.
But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Right now it’s still the pre-season. The whining kid may be getting on your nerves but there’s an easy way to make him go away. Just click on the magic link below to see how – it allows you to predict the scores of the first round of games coming up this weekend.
As we’re still in pre-season mode (and will be till the transfer window shuts) with half our statistical resources currently in Brazil doing a recce for next years’s World Cup, we may not be as quick out of the blocks with the results as we normally are – but bear with us or we’ll stick you on the naughty step.
ALL MOUTH NO TROUSERS 