Liverpool survive, sixteen goals later…
Guy Bailey
Editor’s Note: Guy Bailey returns for another campaign of columns for The Yanks Are Coming throughout the Barclay’s Premier League season. He’ll discuss the happenings overseas in the world’s most popular sports league, as well as The Championship, where many Americans ply their trade. Guy offers a unique perspective on the league as a Brit who lived for a long while in the United States before moving back to Teeside a year ago. He can be reached at guyrbailey@gmail.com and you can follow him on Twitter all EPL season at @guyrbailey.
Two Weeks of Barclay’s Premier League, Europa and Carling Capital One Cup action to catch you up on so let’s dive right in, starting with the most recent action..
It’s worse than it sounds because we’d kept two clean sheets in a row. Our debutant goalkeeper Jamal Blackman on loan from Chelsea has what on paper looks like the worst debut performance ever letting in 16 goals but was cheered like a hero at the end but I digress.
I don’t often get the chance to talk about my own team Middlesbrough here, partly because we are outside the EPL this season, and therefore don’t exist in the eyes of the mainstream sports media, like the 76 other professional football clubs in England that comprise the Football League – the oldest professional footballing competition in the world, starting in 1888 compared to the arrivistes of the EPL in 1992. But for 138 shining minutes on Tuesday evening, we’re part of a sentence on every football fans lips. We have a stronger than average squad this season with some real strength and depth up front and we picked a reasonable team to face Liverpool away in the League Cup – a competition both clubs have won in the past 10 years – and we entered Anfield in pretty good form, three wins in a row including a sparkling 4-0 demolition of Brentford the previous Saturday. Liverpool by contrast have started the season sputteringly, losing 3-1 at West Ham the previous Saturday with the orchestrator being Stewart Downing, West Ham’s ex-Liverpool, Middlesbrough born schemer – an omen in hindsight.
We gave the highly rated and generally high Jamal Blackman a debut but it was looking a little foolish after he misread a routine collection then allowed the follow up shot from Liverpool debutant Jordan Rossiter to slip between his legs while he attempted the Charleston. We could have gone under at that point but steadied the ship with some solid defending and with Lee Tomlin floating behind the impressive Kike up front, started throwing a couple of punches of our own. It was an hour before one landed as Adam Reach ghosted in front of the ponderous Kolo Toure to equalize. The last half hour was back and forth and indeed Boro could have won it in regular time when Adam Clayton hit the post with three minutes to go. Extra time loomed and Boro had already achieved their first objective of not getting murdered on national TV. Liverpool retook the lead as Suso scored through a host of bodies from the edge of the area and then Liverpool tried to take the sting out of the game despite bringing on Mario Balotelli to ensure victory. It looked like a brave defeat all the way to the last minute when stumbling liability Toure took out Patrick Bamford in the area, and the young Chelsea loanee was cool enough to pick himself up and convert to force penalty kicks. Bamford himself missed Boro’s first one as every other one was dispatched and current flavour of the month and Kid n Play lookalike Raheem Sterling came up to seal the victory and his burgeoning reputation – only for Blackman to build his own reputation by saving away to his right. Cue sudden death and an exhibition of penalty taking excellence as a total of 19 successive penalties were scored including one each from Blackman and his opposite number Mignolet. Boro’s Ghanaian World Cup winger Albert Adomah was the unlucky man who saw his final penalty drift wide and Liverpool progress into the 4th round as everybody secretly breathed a sigh of relief and looked at their watches working out how much sleep they would get. Not much for the travelling 2800 Boro fans who wouldn’t make it back to Teesside until after 3am the following day.
Ghana international Adomah missed, but sometimes it’s okay to lose a classic.
Losing the football equivalent of a scissor-paper-rock contest really doesn’t feel like a defeat at all. In fact we come out with a lot of plusses, no injuries, the experience of playing at a big premiership ground again for a lot of the young players who previously haven’t, the support and club being enhanced by association in such a classic match, taking a Champions League team with seven internationals in it costing more than £117m to 120 minutes without losing and the UK public and beyond realizing that maybe the Boro are a good team again is something we would all have traded a home tie with Swansea City for.
The next big game of the season looms on Saturday away to Charlton Athletic and if we don’t get promoted back to the EPL in May then the season will ultimately be judged a failure and this night a footnote – but a footnote in a classic is worth more a lot more than every single copy of a Justin Bieber biography.
Oh other matches… Man Utd got humped again, 5-3 at Leicester City this time proving that a wildcat offense doesn’t work so well in soccer; Frank Lampard stars in the pilot of his own Fox ‘amnesia’ style drama where he wakes up as a Man City player, makes his debut against Chelsea, scoring the winner, and only he can remember his previous life as their previous record goalscorer over 13 years with them – it will be called “Unforgettaball”; Alan Pardew plays his get out of jail free card, otherwise known as Pappas Cisse, who brought on against club medical advice (maybe the doctors hate Pardew too) scores twice to salvage a point and maybe his bosses job against Hull.
Derby Day this weekend coming as Liverpool and Everton face off with both in indifferent form and Arsenal looking to take advantage of a similarly somnambulant Spurs. The over/under is will we see as many goals as Liverpool and Middlesbrough served up on Tuesday (30) in the whole of the EPL this weekend? The line is no. Winners claim our best thoughts and prayers. #FreeSimmons
Classic Pardew face.
And, is Time Out on the Tyne?
Despite the draw with Hull and a League Cup win over Crystal Palace, who can’t beat anyone but Everton these days, it seems fair to ask questions about Alan Pardew’s job.
I know it is a legitimate question becauwse one can always tell what the big football stories are of a week not by totaling the headlines, but by going through the memes filling your timeline so Manchester United crushing QPR jumped to the top, only to see their being embarrassed by Leicester replacing that dominant win. The mockery from Liverpool and Arsenal fans especially is tinged with self interest especially if Van Gaal and his expendabkles do turn into the real deal because it’s one of these they are overhauling.
Similarly, you can tell how badly a club is doing through the reaction of opposition fans. Man Utd knew they were in crisis when opponents stopped laughing and started commiserating with them. Hate like love is a passion and like a relationship, once passion is replaced by pity, you’re done. So it is with Newcastle United and Alan Pardew . This Newcastle fanzine editorial gives the best background but two years into an eight year deal, not so much a manager as human combination of lightning rod and voodoo doll. An English Ranieri but with personality issues replacing urbanity, a manager for whom the term embattled is invented for. Part patsy, part pet, He’d do well at Cardiff under the Tan Man, who ironically were the last home opponents for Newcastle last season and despite beating them 0-3, Pardew daren’t venture outside of his dugout for fear of full throated abuse from 50,000 angry geordies. The full-throated criticism slowed after the draw with Hull City and the League Cup win, but only for a moment.
Liverpool were the only English winners in the Champions League last week, with Man City and Arsenal capitulating to their Bundesliga counterparts and Chelsea managing a disappointing 1-1 with Schalke underlining German superiority in every area, manageable and not with capacity crowds paying reasonable prices to watch. The good news? Everton won their Europa match, which reduced the sting of Partizan Belgrade drawing 0-0 with Tottenham in a match that set soccer back decades for those who watched.
The tie for Spurs, along with defeat to West Brom, rubs in the fact that Tottenham are also in the stage of having received their eviction notice from White Hart Lane for the 2017/18 season for renovations. No word on whether Spurs are ringing around friends to see if they can sleep on their sofa for a season. Arsenal, Chelsea and West Ham have cocked a deaf ear, and some usually sensible people are even throwing up the prospect of them moving out of London for the season to share with the MK Dons in Milton Keynes. This is a delightful irony, the fake ass Frankenstein franchise FC usurped in their own stadium by another team. There is also the possibility that they want to play at West Ham’s old ground, like squatters breaking into an abandoned building.
On a brighter similarly dark note– here is your weekly moment of zen…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpsiPClpdzg
As noted, Guy Bailey writes on the Barclay’s Premier League for The Yanks Are Coming. Want more Guy Bailey? We highly recommend his new book, Blessay From America, a collection of writings made while living in America, where he married a southern belle and saw his son born, which you can purchase here.