Last weekend’s North London Derby produced a rare thing in modern football – a rousing, end to end Steven Seagal-style action romp of a football match. There may have been no goals but it was furious, exciting and, most importantly, great entertainment.
Of course, there are still thrilling games in the Premier League (the previous meeting of Spurs and Arsenal being a prime example), but compared to past years there appears to be a noticeably scant amount of entertaining teams, players and matches. Certainly, if there are entertaining individuals then the top teams appear to have monopolised their services (Do Man Utd really need Berbatov, Rooney, Tevez and Ronaldo? Play fair guys).
Cast your mind back 10 or 15 years to a time when the Premier League was attempting it’s first kiddy steps, tottering towards world domination and ludicrous salaries. Cynics would suggest that it is easy to look upon this era through rose-tinted specs and coo about the thrilling yet ultimately naïve performances of the majority of the sides plying their trade at the time. True, the league has certainly wised up tactically and the influence of various and abundant foreign players and coaches have improved the technical reaches of the game, but at what cost?
When the Premier League began, games were captivating, not because of tactical prowess or fantastical technical displays but because of pure blood, guts and fire. Not only were games exciting, but nearly every side in the league, even the less fashionable ones, had at least one fascinating, unpredictable or down-right brilliant player. Players like Georgi Kinkladze, Paolo Di Canio, Stan Collymore, Benito Carbone, Matt Le Tissier, Dwight Yorke, Tony Yeboah, Juninho, Fabrizio Ravanelli, and Les Ferdinand all served clubs in the lower echelons of the table at one time or another and were all players who were worth watching. That’s not to say that these players were always magnificent, nor that they would make it into many of the teams today (tactical naivety again) but they were all players who, at times, did the unpredictable, the exciting and the mesmeric.
A question. Which of the current Premier League sides would you pay to watch? Bolton? Fulham? Sunderland? Newcastle? Stoke? Middlesbrough? Blackburn?... you get the idea. Indeed, out of those sides mentioned, how many have individuals that would excite you sufficiently to pay out your hard earned wages? Not many I’d imagine and this is indicative of the wholesale shift in ethos of English football.
We all know the cause: money. Too much cash has made teams more worried about not losing than winning; the stakes have become too high. Combine that fear of failure with the defensively-minded successes of messrs Mourinho and Benitez, and it’s easy to see why managers may err on the side of caution when selecting their teams.
So, we are left with this somewhat depressing credo: The cautious rather than the captivating; the industrious rather than the imaginative; the effective rather than the entertaining.
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