Sissoko was the Transfer Deadline’s largest prize. Which says a ton about the transfer window?
Editor’s Note: Guy Bailey writes columns for The Yanks Are Coming throughout the Premier League season. In those columns, 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 to cover. A frantic end to a seasonably dull transfer window. An international break mostly adrift of drama. Here’s our best shot.
Transfer Dogflap special – 1.9.16
So the transfer window flops shut as it would behind a lazy cat coming in for it’s breakfast and £1.165 billion later, we can start the EPL season properly. That’s $154,618,800 by the way and I’m not going to go into how many hospitals or care homes that could build or staff as this money is allocated purely for bread and circuses. It’s a paltry 20% of the £5.1bn in the new TV deal and with the bottom team in the EPL guarantee £100m just for showing up (not including future parachute payments), it’s no wonder that 13 teams broke their own transfer records on the likes of Jeff Kendrick and the gloriously named and hairstyles Didier N’Dong.
So what were the main eye-catching deals on a deadline day described as exciting by the same people who think reality TV stardom is a reputable career path because they’ve confused fame with notoriety and think it’s the same thing?
Jack Wilshere, the RG III of the Premier League?
Jack Wilshere, the EPL’s RGIII but treated with far more indulgence than the quarterback for reasons that I for one have never quite grasped. (I’ve grasped them, people.)
Yes he can play a pass but his reputation is definitely inflated because of who he plays for. He once spent a season at Bolton earlier in his career and I guarantee if he was Bolton born and bred and had the same injury-hit record he has right now then the closest he would be to an England squad would be paying his ticket money at Wembley with the rest of us.
Wilshere also epitomises the little Englander mindset, which you might have noticed is in vogue in the country at the moment, when faced with a choice between Crystal Palace, Bournemouth and Roma, he didn’t think twice before packing his sandals and shorts and heading to the South Coast rather than the Eternal City. True, he could have expected some roughing up in Serie A but they year would have transformed him as a footballer and an individual. At least Joe Hart surprised everybody by going to Torino although his welcome address to the fans was given with the same glassy eyed delivery as if he was reading his own ransom demand.
Matt Miazga’s loan to Vitesse coming at the expense of a bizarre move for David Luiz has US fans irritable.
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I guess some people are afraid of change.
We all are to an extent and we’ve all spent moments thinking that if we could just go back to the job, girl, house, car and make a different decision this time then everything would be alright in the present. We might even trade £34m to do it which is what Chelsea did to bring maverick defensive timebomb David Luiz back from Paris. I suppose management was reasoning that behind Kanté, who this week was dubbed “better than Makelele” by Nemanja Matic, who is familiar with both, the damage Luiz will cause going forward will negate what destruction he inevitably brings at the back. Still, for Chelsea, it’s a curious move. And it is one that made American Matt Miazga’s presence at the Bridge, and not a loan to an obscure place like Vitesse, an odd choice, to the chagrin of American fans overseas.
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Other life lessons from the transfer window closing.
There are also, in life, people who string you along right until the last moment before going off with the other guy at the end of the night. Even if you have a chartered jet standing by, they’ll slip off with the guy with the pencil moustache who you’ve already seen kissing somebody else by the toilets that night.
Everton will understand, themselves an object lesson after seeing Moussa Sissoko giving them the doe eyes for days biaefore deciding to throw his lot in with Spurs. Enner Valencia, never Sissoko but a guy who can run the channels, on loan from West Ham being their consolation squeeze.
Typical long-winding negotiations from Chairman Daniel Levy once again, a man who would spend 10 minutes looking at the Burger King drive through menu before demanding some Mcdonald’s Mozzarella bites with his order at the end or else he’ll call the whole thing off.
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Elsewhere, in a rare example of trickle-down economics at play, there was a lot being splashed around in the Championship as well with Aston Villa outlying more than £60m in this window alone to land the likes of Ross McCormack for £12m, £15m on one-season wonder Jonathan Kodjia from Bristol City and £8m on mercurial Albert Adomah but at least Boro got Adama Traore back in return which allows great scope to several Borostar Galacticos puns and photoshops of Lorne Greene lighting up the Riverside like a Cylon Basestar.
The whole episode was also a reminder that for all the harm done by Randy Lerner at Aston Villa, the man did accumulate equity, and it is equity that buys good footballers, and good footballers that keep you from staying too long at the roadside inn that is the Championship.
Pep’s first Manchester Derby tomorrow has been an exercise in expectation lowering.
Bent as a three dollar bill – 7.9.16
And then, after an international break…we return to football.
Occasionally a story or rumour so fantastical comes around that actually turns out to be true. Like the 27th letter of the alphabet being the ampersand – & – or there was a 13th sign of the Zodiac – Arachni the Spider – but fell out of use because 13 was considered to be unlucky.
So with the EPL’s hyperbole machine in full effect they might be onto something when they bill Saturday lunchtime’s Manchester Derby as a critical encounter even at such an early stage. And the hype builds even as Pep Guardiola wisely lowers expectations.
A win would maintain either team’s 100% record while a draw might be seen as a better result for the away team, City, than if the game was at the Etihad across town.
They will be missing their talisman Sergio Aguero who has started the season in such cracking form but you can’t go around swinging your elbows like a 1920s flapper girl at the Rainbow Rooms, especially when they connect with the throat of the fella beto hind.
What is more curious about this incident, not that it was so clear cut, but that it happened literally two feet in front of the referee.
Cue all kinds of conspiracy theories about pressure being placed on him to avoid it and sending off superstars that might lower the entertainment value of the spectacle. A retired referee came out this week and alleged exactly this, that he had been nobbled by the powers that be in order for a heavier punishment to be levied on another player.
The Secret Footballer reported this in 2013 when a referee had told him that the Premier League Chief Exec had addressed them all, told them they were part of the entertainment business and that “nobody” wanted to see the best players sent off every week (wink wink). Well anybody billing recordings of last week’s 0-0 draw between West Brom and Middlesbrough as an entertaining product would be getting done under the Trade Descriptions Act but it also highlights the pressure referees are under. It’s even more difficult at the start of the season, as referees are trying to enforce the latest edicts from the league – see previous columns for the effects to stamp down on visible dissent-while in the main, trying to maintain a working relationship with the players without falling into their shallow traps, right Mark Clattenburg?
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Once we get through the star-studded cavalcade of wonder that is Burnley v Hull, Bournemouth v West Brom and Boro v Palace; we get another game which will have big bearings on the progress of the sides involved – Liverpool welcoming reigning champs Leicester (I’m going to highlight that whole name for Leicester City all year) to Anfield.
Everton can also resemble a nerdy guy turned tech gazillionaire who will stop at the crosswalk in his Bentley to see the homecoming queen who snubbed him back in the day, crossing in front dragging three kids of varying continental ancestry along while pushing a trolley full of Piggly Wiggly bags when they meet down on his luck David Moyes for a drink in his last chance of managerial credibility saloon in Sunderland.
The phony war is over and now it feels like the real season is about to get under way in earnest.
Although i don’t expect agreement from the EPL marketing team for whom every day is Christmas, Hannukah and Thanksgiving rolled into one.
Just like Burnley v Hull then.
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 was married to a southern belle and saw his son born. Wnat to read the book? Then purchase here.