Revolution Is In The Air

The plot thickens. This is without doubt the most intriguing Premiership title race in aeons. After a few years of suffocating predictability, during which the league lost all semblance of competitive balance and turned into a dreary quadropoly, the magic is back.

The good old credit crunch has hit football’s zillionaire behemoths — notably, Manchester United and Liverpool — right in the wallet (my heart bleeds), while previously mid-ranking powers (Spurs, Aston Villa, Man City) have demonstrated that they’re capable of troubling the superpowers. The revolution is still in its infancy — essentially, we’re still watching a three-horse race between teams who between them have won every title since 1995 — but the general evening-out of standards will work wonders for football’s appeal. The game lost much of its lustre in recent years as the Big Four’s stranglehold became absolute. The sense that things would never change, that the yawning chasm between the Big Four and the rest was permanent and only ever likely to widen, became oppressively pervasive.

Now that something resembling multi-party democracy has been restored, even fans of the established superpowers can be heard confessing that they prefer it this way. That there’s something inherently more attractive about a League where anyone has a real chance of beating anyone on a given day and the top six or seven clubs are separated by less than a dozen points. That Match of the Day is actually worth staying in for on Saturday nights again. That excitement on weekend afternoons now comes quite naturally, rather than having to be summoned up out of some vague sense of duty.

At the time of writing, Man City’s anticipated January transfer splurge hasn’t materialised, and nobody else has two cents to rub together, so unless a galaxy of superstars arrives at Eastlands over the next few days, the assumption has to be that Arsenal, United and Chelsea will scrap it out.

Foul Play still can’t see past Chelsea for the title: the unofficial winter break enforced by the festive season’s Arctic conditions arrived at precisely the right time for them, just when the wheels appeared to be coming off, and they looked truly blood-curdling in their recent 7-2 mutilation of Sunderland. And that was without their African contingent, shortly to return. Lest we forget, this team won 3-0 away to Arsenal recently, and made it look like a walk in the park. They’re not as invincible as under Jose Mourinho, but they’ve become a good deal more watchable, and Iook by far the best bet to tough it out to the end.

My old friends United, for their part, have looked strangely lifeless while doing just about enough to stay in contention. I wouldn’t be stupid enough to write them off yet — they have the almighty Wayne Rooney, the best manager in the history of the game (arise Sir Alex) and a time-honoured tradition of peaking when it counts — but they are conspicuously short of explosive fire-power.

Giggs, Scholes and Neville are showing signs of wear and tear, Michael Owen is a genuinely tragic shadow of the fleet-footed magician who once held us all spellbound, and the new breed (Obertan, Anderson, Valencia, Macheda) looks suspiciously like a re-run of the Kleberson/Djemba-Djemba/Bellion axis that dragged United down the tubes in the mid-Noughties.
Most notably, Fergie himself has clearly sensed that something’s amiss, becoming increasingly grouchy (a classic pattern whenever things aren’t running smoothly for his team) rather than exuding the supreme unflappable confidence he has emanated during most of his 24-year reign of terror. This crankiness has manifested itself in obsessive attachment to the old stopwatch and a near-pathological compulsion to terrorise referees. As PG Wodehouse once said, ‘it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine’.

As for Arsenal, you could watch them all day and well into the night, but they remain the least likely of the trio to become champions. Flat-track bullies accustomed to putting lesser teams through the shredder and doing so in a style that betimes would leave Brazil 1982 gasping, the suspicion remains that they still haven’t shaken off the mental fragility which has been their Achilles heel over the years, the magnificent Fabregas notwithstanding.

The battle for fourth place and its attendant financial windfall is likely to be between Man City and Liverpool. Spurs have a great set of strikers, but a generally uninspiring back eight. I see them finishing a distant seventh, and wouldn’t be too gobsmacked if Alex McLeish’s ever-improving Birmingham finished above them. Aston Villa’s lack of squad depth, and Martin O’Neill’s reluctance to rotate, are likely to militate heavily against them in the final third of the season.
The opposite may well apply to Liverpool, who for all their atrocious recent form, have traditionally gotten stronger in the second half of the season under Benitez. Rafa’s handling of media duties is painful to behold, and his record in the transfer market distinctly unimpressive, but he’s not the world’s worst tactician, and I have a feeling that their season is likely to improve from here on in.

Nonetheless, City must be favoured to snatch fourth. Which, after decades of ritual humiliation at places like Bury and Stockport, will entitle Foul Play to pop a champagne cork or two.
Of course, I have vague misgivings about the Faustian pact the club has struck (though it’s deeply ironic to hear Man United fans suddenly whinging bitterly about a disparity in purchasing power between the two clubs).

And I’ll admit there is something undeniably odious about City’s chief executive Garry Cook, who cut his corporate teeth as a spokesman for Nike and was prone to bouts of excruciating public brown-nosing towards previous owner Thaksin Shinawatra, wanted for gross violations of human rights during his stint as dictator of Thailand.

Still, the furore over Mark Hughes’ belated sacking was ridiculous, and much of the tabloid outcry had the distinctive whiff of ‘British Jobs For British Workers’ about it. Hughes showed no signs whatsoever of being able to organise an effective defence, and sounded positively delusional when he claimed that the team were meeting their agreed pre-season targets after rattling off seven straight draws and failing to beat Burnley or Hull at home.

The suave Italian Roberto Mancini has instantly tightened up the defence (if United have hockeyed us 6-0 on the day after my deadline, please disregard this sentence), discarded under-performing dead wood like the lamentable Robinho, and restored some badly-needed solidity to a team which was displaying uncomfortable Harlem Globetrotters tendencies under his predecessor.

World domination may still be two or three years away, but I don’t doubt it’s only a matter of time.

Ironically, this may well return us to a situation where the Premiership is too predictable and dominated by one ultra-wealthy monolith, but I’ll decide how I feel about it when we get there.
In the interim, as City prepare to obliterate all opposition in pursuit of twenty Trebles in a row, let’s enjoy this season’s knife-edge battle for the title. It might be the closest contest for some time to come.