Kevin de Bruyne is the best damn player in football, & Other Stories.
Image courtesy of @alexlanting
Last night I tried to get the football chat going with Coco-Pop, who has the flu; but I think he checked out after my observation that Atalanta looked like “Inter Milan on shit drugs,” in the first half of their game against Napoli. Watching this as opposed to yet another Tottenham Hotspur meltdown, which happened at Sheffield, and almost simultaneously, was as an easy call. I checked out of the Atalanta game as soon as I realised Liverpool were travelling to City. I am here - as one does - to make a short series of volatile statements and predictions, after watching only portions of all the football. I trust Coco-Pop will dial me up minutes after we publish the thing, to remind me I’m a bit of an idiot.
Kevin De Bruyne has been the third best player in football, fine, and you Messi/Cristiano cult members have slept on him the whole damn time.
It was easy to predict City’s complete disinterest in letting Liverpool leave the Etihad Stadium with both the Premier League crown and City’s dignity. There was an early threat of a lead for the Reds, who respected the occasion enough to field a first team side. But City found their stride before the break, and handed Raheem Sterling the dagger at every possible opportunity. The whole thing reeked of vengeance, and forewarning too, for whatever the hell football looks like when it resurfaces next season. De Bruyne worked the channels, playing laser-beam passes and slipping into brand new spaces with the malevolence and urgency of a man who has absolutely had it with all this pandemic shit. The Belgian seems to be two or three plays ahead of the rest of the field, never stops moving, and good Lord can he pick a pass - from out a basket of world-class defenders, if need be, and through the daintiest of needles. Messi is glorious, and no human being has or may ever manipulate a football in the unique fashion that he does - but he’s like your new favourite band going global with the second album, and enlisting Rick Rubin to record the third. The magic is still there, but it belongs to everybody now. De Bruyne is literary fiction, prestige cinema: a bird whose exquisite genius you have to be paying particular attention to recognise. I tend to root for cities, in my life as a fan - but, gosh, it would be an honour to die for De Bruyne’s curious alchemy.
Leo Messi is going to City or Guardiola’s going back to Barcelona. There are no if’s or but’s.
AS reports that, behind the scenes, Lionel Messi is doubling down on fairly negative comments he made a few months back about Barcelona brass never taking responsibility for the off-the-field (and one presumes he meant recruitment) failures. This ends one of two ways: someone within Barca’s administration loses their job, because you don’t antagonise The Asset, and Pep Guardiola is drafted in at the 11th hour to further appease the mercurial Argentine. If this happens too late, if Messi has already made contact with another club by the time these wheels begin to turn, the man buggers off anyway. In this scenario, Pep effectively refuses to be used as a chess-piece, or heralded as a magic bullet for the franchise. I think he waits a few years. He probably singlehandedly determines, actually, which situation he and Messi pick. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me they were on a Zoom call right now.
Tottenham Hotspur need to rid themselves of Jose Mourinho’s contract immediately, if ENIC Group is to steer the Lilywhite ship forwards.
I have asked myself, on truly bad days, why on earth I exacerbate all of my existential problems by being - to boot - a Tottenham Hotspur fan. The pattern of self-destruction is back to normal, post-Pochettino. We come out and wait for the opposing side to show us what they’ve got - we try and catch them on the counter - even if we sneak a lead, as we did against United, we then make no effort whatsoever to press our advantage. The other team equalises, and threatens to leave with all three points. Mourinho, this is the newest thing, talks some arty-farty nonsense to the media about ‘phases of play’; how exactly one refereeing decision or precisely one substitution affected the entire game, because football is a game of one or two isolated probabilities (and not several). Spurs Twitter banters with itself about the good old days, how adventurous we were under Pochettino, and grudgingly accepts that star striker Harry Kane surely deserves superior conditions of employment.
I think the future presents itself quite clearly to Daniel Levy, the club’s chairman, and ENIC group, the club’s ownership. Tottenham are not capable of qualifying for the Champions’ League. Head-to-head, they simply do not possess the talent reserves of Manchester United; the cunning of Leicester City; the tenacity of a young and exciting Chelsea side; or even the resourcefulness of Sheffield United. Management ought be preparing itself for a talent raid beyond just Harry Kane, certainly within the next two seasons. (I can only think, just now, of how attractive Heung-Min Son must look to most takers.)
Do you start the season playing Mourinho’s brand of hope-for-the-best football, where elite playmakers sit in the trenches and wait, without the defensive talent or conditioning to help withstand an attacking onslaught? Does that cost less than just severing Mourinho’s contract, and making - please God Almighty - a deep-pocket offer for the coaching services of RB Leipzig’s Julian Nagelsmann? What does it mean to bring that level of excitement back to the stands at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium when, potentially, there will still be no one there in a year’s time? The very drastic alternative is that ENIC Group sells, and makes an asset auction somebody else’s problem.
I can’t even look at the answers, Coco-Pop.
