Friday, 22 December 2017

This is how football should be played, or should it?

Day -174 WorldCup2018

I despair, occasionally.....quite often, about having to watch the English Premier League as a filler for four years in between each World Cup. The Premier League is my football staple. Until this hobby makes me a living I do not have 6 TVs going with simultaneous live matches from all over the world.

There are many weekends when the emotional aftermath of watching a match doesn't match the excited anticipation of a Friday night. And as the Christmas program comes by there is always the hope for a feast of exhilarating action. I enjoy the lazy football mornings, the back to back matches. I sometimes just wish, despite it being my measure of football turgid-ness, that I was watching Costa Rica-Greece in the World Cup.

And then, just as I'm wondering whether this going to be a good Christmas football season, Arsenal-Liverpool happens. On a Friday afternoon. At the start of the Christmas weekend. When I have nothing else to do. When the rest of the family are busy and I can watch, uninterrupted. A classic. An end-to-end smorgasbord of football action. From 2-0 to Liverpool to 3-2 to Arsenal in 388 seconds. An absolute masterclass of terrible, inept defending. "Defenders hit the sherry early", is how one online commenter explained why it was so much fun. When Liverpool made it 3-3 because Arsenal's defence parted oh-so-politely for Firminio to shoot through Petr Cech's not-so-strong arms. I looked forward to the possibility of a 6-5 last minute winner. It didn't happen but what a feast anyway.

The purists may have been deriding the lack of quality. Pep may have have been sitting in his Manchester mansion, surrounded by his 6 TVs of simultaneous live matches from all over the world, crying. Not tears of joy that his team's opponents were that bad, but agonized tears that football could be played this irresponsibly. For the rest of us it was the most fun we'd had watching football for a long time.

Now I can bring my football watching life to a point of comparison after many years. Brazil 1982. My first love. Liverpool are doing a very good job of emulating that team. Fun to watch, breathtaking at times. But all that flair, all that football played with careless abandonment, the way it should be played for the fans, counts for nothing. The joy of the spectacle not matched by the long-term results. Eder, Falcao, Socrates, Junior. Firminio, Coutinho. Salah, Mane. All remembered in history for what. Winning, or entertaining?

But today: thank-you Arsenal and Liverpool for a memorable start to the Christmas 2018. I'm not sure Stoke-West Brom tomorrow will be able to match the show you put on.
(At about 3.55pm, Toronto time, I was drooling over Mohammed Salah's goal for Liverpool to put them 2-0 up. I thought my post tonight was going to be about that goal and Liverpool's demolition of Arsenal. What a crazy, crazy game. How can you not love it on days like today?)

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