A dark moment that has no place in football came during the Serbia-Albania fixture.
Guy Bailey
Editor’s Note: Guy Bailey writes columns for The Yanks Are Coming throughout the Barclay’s 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 of action in England to catch up with after #ThanksLD week, so let’s get right in it, starting with the international week…
Watch The Skies…
Sometimes international weekends are full of blood and thunder grudge matches, intrigue, tension. There can be a lot riding on these games – we get to see club players come to the fore and see if they can perform on the biggest and brightest of stages. We get to see if internationals having a patchy time of it in the EPL can shrug off their troubles with a brace against weaker opposition and prove that form is temporary but class is permanent. We get to see future starts and unknowns come to big countries, turn it on and then look forward to seeing more of them in the transfer window as the relegation battles tighten and teams are looking down the barrel of a $80m revenue drop and will spend, Spend, SPEND now to get out of it.
None of these things happened in this international break and we cannot wait to get back to the bread and butter of the EPL. Fan cannot live on caviar and lobster thermidor alone.
England stuttered to pedestrian wins over San Marino and Estonia to a collective yawn from the public. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are more involved as all have reasonable chances of qualifying for the finals of a major tournament for the first time in years but the biggest story was the grudge match between Serbia and Albania boiling over with a game being abandoned to drone interference for the first time ever. A drone bearing an inflammatory/revolutionary flag depending on your point of view was flown into the stadium and circled a couple of times before coming within grabbing reach of one or two of the Serbian players. They treated it as you would a rag you’d used to mop up dog puke which didn’t go down well with the Albanians who started wailing on them – not just the players but staff and officials too. The English ref (there’s the link!) abandoned the game and got the H out of there quickly followed by the Albanians who realised it was an away game and they had no legal supporters in the stands as 80,000 Serbs started baying for their blood. They got off in a hail of chairs, blows and phlegm. The brother of the Albanian Prime Minister was reportedly lifted by the police for the offence but it will be interesting if the return fixture goes ahead, never mind where. It was bizarre, and it was sad. The reality? There is no place for this in international football. And there is no silver lining.
Yaya and the Champs play pretenders Spurs in the game of the week.
The standout game this weekend is Man City entertaining perennial pretenders Spurs – more of an acid test for the visitors but another waypoint to measure how far Pochettino moulding of the team has come. Sunderland make the second longest away trip in the division going to high flying Southampton while Chelsea make one of the shortest across London to Crystal Palace. Newcastle and beleaguered boss Alan Pardew entertaining solid looking Leicester City still seeking their first win of the new season. He will no doubt be watching the skies, not for divine intervention but for wayward drones as the Albanians have certainly raised the bar on organised fan dissent and shown that hastily scrawled bedsheets proclaming PardewOut.com, and the slightly more genteel sackpardew.com, aren’t cgoing to cut it at the top level anymore.
Meanwhile, the action a fortnight ago brought a…
Well that’s what the EPL’s latest barmy notion of a game abroad would be – all the glamour and excitement of Yannick Bolasie running at Michael Dawson etc. If I was MLS commish Don Garber, I’d have laughed so much I’d have needed to go to lunch early. They would sell you the promise of Liverpool v Man Utd or Chelsea v Arsenal but this is the reality. Like when the NBA played a regular season game in London earlier this year, everybody got hyped, sensing the Heat against the Spurs or maybe Kobe and the Lake Show taking on the Rockets but talk about the bait and switch – ladies and gentlemen, welcome the Brooklyn Nets versus your Atlanta Hawks! Utterly laughable and I’m a Hawks fan!
The Jaguars mascot desecrating an England landmark, only to be sent again by Roger Goodell.
The NFL have tried to pull the same stunt in London and ended up sending us the Jags and the Rams for four years straight. Some ideas are just so bad they don’t deserve further consideration – so I guarantee this will be on the agenda sometime soon.
Chelsea stuck it to Arsenal again, 2-0 and the pressure finally got to Wenger as he indulged in some unseemly shoving with the Special One in the technical area. Wenger with previous reprimands for tunnel fighting and roughing up the opposition, may have actually acomplished something, or not- he never beats Mourinho in anything.Fortunately the fourth official stepped in to stop any bloodshed. Injury was added to insult after the final whistle as underperforming Mesut Ozil was ruled out for 12 weeks with a knee injury. Catastrophic for most teams, Arsenal losing a creative attacking midfielder is like finding a hole in your sock, you can just reach down and pull out a new one as they can with Cazorla, Arteta or Rosicky.
Man Utd’s three-wheeled bandwagon/wheelbarrow? got back on the tracks with a 2-1 win over an Everton who must be thanking their lucky stars to be in the same league as Newcastle or else they would be the big story about a big club in decline. In America, it would appear, they already are if you believe Grantland, despite being only seven points off where eventual champion Manchester City were through seven matches a year ago. I don’t think for a minute their downturn is anything other than temporary but any more dropped points and they might be the team filling the ‘nobody expected them to be down there’ bracket come Christmas, but at least that’s more preferable to the ‘too good to go down’ which Newcastle have achieved so many times they might be expected to keep it. Despite failing to win again, they have a striker in form in Pappas Cisse and talent sprinkled throughout the team but like a sports car filled with Diesel, they’re just not firing.
Stewart Downing has West Ham fans enjoying themselves again.
Mauricio Pochettino beat his revamped former Southampton team 1-0 to put to bed the unbelievable rumours that he may have been on his way out although given Spurs it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility. West Ham saw their good form continue with a 2-0 over QPR, masterminded by a resurgent Stewart Downing playing as the playmaker at the point of the midfield diamond. Downing has always been one of my favourite players: fast, clever and with a left foot that can pick locks. Ever since bursting onto the Premiership scene with Middlesbrough as a fearless winger, he inspired Villa to their best recent seasons working in tandem with Ashley Young, another fierce forward who has since lost his way before becoming the scapegoat for Brendan Rogers first season at Anfield. He may not have the lightning quick pace of his early years but you don’t lose the eye for a pass or the ability to find it so moving inside was always going to be the natural solution for him. West Ham are still defensively sound, as they were last year under Big Sam- but with Downing in high quality form and Enner Valencia flying around the field, they’re actually dangerous in attack too, something that makes the supporters quite pleased. And content is a feeling that hasn’t visited Upton Park often of late.
More Middlesbrough interest in the MLS as Kei Kamara returns home to join up with renegade former Boro and West Ham headbanger Emanuel Pogatetz who was wrote the foreword to a book on Teesside terrace culture specifically because he was so slow to understand it. The equivalent of letting Terry Bradshaw right an introduction to the revised works of Oscar Wilde.
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.