It’s quite simple
THE object in the game of association football is to score more goals than your opponent, a fact which doesn’t seem to have penetrated the brains of the bods at Spurs.
The other thing is that, generally speaking, though there have been exceptions, the best way to score more goals than the opposition is to actually shoot.
Again, that seems to have passed Spurs by, as they completed their mission to go four Premier League games without troubling the opposition keeper last week against Everton.
When there were about 20 minutes to go, Andy Townsend pointed out that Spurs had no recognised striker on the pitch, which is of course a shameful state of affairs, but frankly they could have had Jimmy Greaves, Alan Gilzean, Martin Chivers, Steve Archibald, Garth Crooks, Jurgen Klinsman, Clive Allen, Gary Lineker, Robbie Keane, Dimitar Berbatov, Jermaine Defoe and Harry Kane out there and it wouldn’t have made any difference considering the lack of creativity available to feed those brilliant strikers.
To paraphrase the bard, there’s something rotten in the state of N17.
Here we go again
This is now season number eight in the life of VAR and it’s still causing ructions, seemingly on a weekly basis, with the focus this past week on happenings at Old Trafford and the Stadium of Light.
Ignore the fact that VAR has led to two changes in the handball laws and four changes to the offside laws in that time, as could be seen last weekend, the implementation and or interpretation of VAR by the officials is still a mess.
Ten-man Man City did deserve to win at Old Trafford, but there is no way on earth their goal should have stood; that it did wasn’t so much a failure of VAR, but a failure of the man using it to understand the basics of the offside law as it stands – must do better.
Meanwhile in Sunderland, Mikel Arteta threw his toys out of the pram because the officials had the effrontery to award the Black Cats a penalty.
He said he was going to demand an explanation from the officials’ governing body for the disgusting decision, claiming that he was doing so for the good of the game.
My take: Arteta is a first-rate whinger who needs to be taken down a peg or three, and the actual penalty decision was one of those that could have gone either way; suck it up buttercup.
Just because every decision went Arsenal’s way last season doesn’t mean he should expect such blatant favouritism this season.
Team of the week
Matz Sels Forest, Leif Davis Ipswich, Jarrad Branthwaite Everton, Vitaly Mykalenko Everton, Pascal Gross Brighton, Kevin Schade Brentford, Bruno Guimares Arsenal, Enzo Fernandez Man City, Mohamed Belloumi Hull, Dominic Calvert-Lewin Leeds, Noah Okafor Leeds.
Manager of the week: Sergej Jakirovic Hull – still enjoying a successful and unexpected start to life in the Premier League.
Player of the week: Enzo Fernandez. As a personality, I can’t stand the guy, but there’s no doubt that on his day he’s a very good footballer.
He ran the show following Phil Foden’s red card, ensuring that Man Utd couldn’t lay a finger on Citeh, who barely missed the presence of Foden.
This week’s games
Premier League today 2:30; Spurs vs Aston Villa. 5pm; Brighton vs Arsenal, Everton vs Ipswich, Newcastle vs Hull. 7:30; Forest vs Coventry. Tomorrow 4pm; Bournemouth vs Liverpool, Leeds vs Palace, Man City vs Sunderland. 6:30; Fulham vs Man Utd.
Selected Championship today 2:30; Millwall vs West Ham. 5pm; Birmingham vs Middlesbrough, Lincoln vs Swansea, Wrexham vs Southampton. Tomorrow 2pm; Wolves vs West Brom. 3:30; Norwich vs Bolton.
Selected Scotland tomorrow 2pm; Celtic vs Rangers.
Games to watch
Bournemouth vs Liverpool, Celtic vs Rangers. Bournemouth sans Andoni Iraola are still very attractive to watch, but so far this season their efforts are being undone by concessions late in the game, yet to win a game this season what better time to garner their first such result?
Liverpool, with Andoni Iraola, are yet to gel as the new manager gets his foot under the Anfield table. Both teams have drawn three out of our this season, is another one on the cards?
Celtic were, to put it bluntly, diabolical at Ibrox last Sunday, and a repeat tomorrow certainly won’t go down to well in East Glasgow and Dublin.
But this isn’t Ibrox and there will be 60,000 rabid fans pushing them on. Have Rangers got the character to fashion a result?
Not the finished article
After two and a half tests vs a woeful Pakistan, England were proclaiming themselves as back to being the best, but the best teams usually see their batsmen wrack up more than one century in two summer series, and the best teams are normally very efficient when it comes to getting the opposition’s tail out for very few runs.
England’s much vaunted pace attack somehow in the third test allowed a 21-year-old bowler making his debut coming in at number nine to spank them around Edgbaston to the tune of 81 runs off 63 balls, all while tying Ben Stoke’s record nine sixes in an innings.
Not for the first time under the captaincy of Joe Root, their tail-end bowling tactics were wrong and, simply put, arrogant in the extreme.
It doesn’t matter which sport, there’s one simple maxim: you have to earn the right to be arrogant and England, under their current leadership, are very far from being in that position.
Fun fact
The bowler in question, Razaullah, in blasting those nine sixes in his debut test equalled Geoff Boycott’s total in his 108-match test career.
Personalities matter
Back in the day when I was captain of the company golf team, I never put the two best players together. Why? Because I’d rather they were in a position to shepherd lesser players.
Additionally, there was almost certainly going to be a clash of egos in how to approach the game, which is best illustrated by multiple US Ryder Cup captains’ efforts to get the best out of their top players Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.
They just didn’t gel in the four ball and foursomes format, and thus were doomed to fail. Which brings us to the Solheim Cup last week: four times the European captain put the two highest ranked players together and four times they got hammered.
Quite simply, there was no chemistry between Lottie Woad and Charlie Hull, so the experiment was doomed to failure.
And finally
Last week I wanted to know what connects Ian Ure with a Scots rugby captain and an England cricket captain.
The answer is a school in Ayr where ex-Dundee, Arsenal and Man Utd centre half Ure studied at the Ayr Academy.
Two of his teammates in the academy rugby team were Ian (Mighty Mouse) McLauchlan, who apart from captaining Scotland is a massive figure on the British Lions scene, and Mike Denness, who became the first and thus far only Scotsman to captain the England cricket team.
As for Ian Ure, I didn’t rate him but he was a part of Bob Shankly’s highly successful Dundee side of the early 1960s that, spearheaded by the superb Alan Gilzean, won the Scottish title and reached the European Cup semi-final the following season, so he can’t have been that bad.
This week: what sartorially distinguished Celtic’s kit from other Scottish clubs until 1994?