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By Andi Thomas and Alex Netherton

Premier League: Season 21 ★★

It is the curse of all successful, long-running entertainment franchises to be judged by what came before. Last season, the writers of Premier League threw everything they had at the ending. Obviously, the last-minute last-kick denouement stretched the credibility, but that didn’t matter: it was outstanding drama, carefully scripted to maximise the pleasure for Manchester City, the pain for Manchester United, and the entertainment for the viewing public.

But that comes with its own problem, which is that when it comes to the next season, you can’t just pull the same trick again. That Premier League was brave enough to try something different should be respected, but the peculiar decision to have the title race done by around January, and the relegation places all decided before the final episode, meant that the only point of any competitive interest on the final day was the end of the Race for Fourth, which took place across two dull, predictable 1-0 wins, only leavened slightly by the comedy stylings of Andre Marriner and his free-jazz interpretations of the penalty laws.

The Race for Fourth has never really caught the imagination of the viewing public, despite the best efforts of the writers, and this was another strained and faltering attempt. In footballing terms it provides one team — this time Arsenal rather than Tottenham — with the opportunity, next season, to go out of Europe earlier in a better competition as opposed to later in a worse one. In financial terms it’s terribly important, but great television is not born from such concerns. At least the writers were clever enough to retain an element of parochial cock-snooking through to the end, and we’d like to shout out the Arsenal fan in London Bridge who, moments before kick-off, decided to ask his friend to photograph him in front of the television, back to the camera, pointing with his thumbs at the customised name on his replica shirt. It’s the Arsenal fans that aren’t ‘Arsenal fans’ we feel sorry for.

The other consequence of the writers’ decision to remove much of the competitive edge from the season has been the attention expended on various ancillary plotlines. It was an inspired decision to bring the cross-season racism arc to an end with a room full of white journalists gasping at a black man using words that they wouldn’t be allowed to, and special mention must go to Roberto Mancini, for a delicate, gripping, and ultimately quite affecting portrayal of a preening man fatally undermined by his own tactical incontinence. The only downside of his descent into paranoid mediocrity is that we won’t get to enjoy it again next season.

Yet despite these moments of triumph — and we should also acknowledge the Luis Suarez Biting Incident, a scintillating moment of comic relief and a wonderful pay off for the years of groundwork that have gone into establishing his character — it’s hard to escape the conclusion that this season dragged terribly. By the time the John Terry: Full Kit jokes were being wheeled out for another airing, it was clear that Premier League has been stuck in a holding pattern for some time, and moments like the end of last season can only distract, temporarily, from the structural issues and lack of variety inherent in the setting.

Already, sweeping changes are being planned for next season. Along with the departing Mancini go Paul Scholes, for the second time, Rafael Benitez, after an unconvincing cameo that pleased some critics but never engaged the fans, and a triumphant Sir Alex Ferguson, whose final scene, sliding down a hill near West Bromwich in a bathtub, will live long in the memory. Producers have denied that Ferguson will return next season, but have hinted that notorious psychopath Jose Mourinho, last seen driving a people-wagon into a London canal, will make a shock return.

New faces; but, one suspects, the same old nonsense. The plotlines — Manchester United are victorious, Alan Pardew is unpopular, Liverpool are hilarious — are familiar and wearing thin; the performances are ranged for the most part between acceptable and risible; the relentless focus on off-field nonsense has stretched the patience of even the most avid viewer. Or at least, it should have. But ratings remain strong, proving once and for all that there is no audience so supine, so content to collaborate with its own cheapening, as viewers of Premier League, which will continue for ever and ever, shiny and loud and utterly relentless.

As a mark of the enjoyment we’ve had doing this in the last year, and as a mark of thanks to all of you, our fantastic audience, we would like to leave you with the following quote from Reginald D Hunter, ‘N–”[Richard Whittall interjects, grabs microphone from Andi and Alex, and screams, "That's it. That is it. You're done. Done. That's it for you at The Score. Never again! Your careers began elsewhere but they end here!"]

By Andi Thomas and Alex Netherton

This weekend was about the reign of a man. A hero to his fans for the unrivalled period of success he brought them. At times at odds with his board, with a noted style of picking fights to settle scores. On one of the biggest days in the history of his club, it was defined most notably by a sense of deep, deep sadness. Now his tenure has come to its end, cruelly. The club can still, though, expect more success to come. You have to ask, has Roberto Mancini ever been so badly treated before?

The answer, of course, is yes. He’s been treated much worse – he indisputably deserves the sack at Manchester City. Here’s why:

Working with Brian Marwood: A lot has been made of Marwood’s failures to deliver Mancini’s top transfer targets, but what kind of man would choose to work with Brian Marwood (and Garry Cook) anyway? The man is denser than antimatter’s energy. The man can barely talk about what he fancies for lunch without somebody stepping in to take him home before he hurts himself. If you do a deal with the devil, you can expect to get burned. If you trust your transfer dealings with a man only marginally clever than a stuffed toy, you then can’t complain when you get Scott Sinclair.

Working with a club that is owned by the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates: The United Arab Emirates has a history of vile human rights abuses. This includes the death penalty for homosexuality, the fact that 80% of its population don’t really have any rights, and that relies on indentured servitude i.e. slavery as a mainstay of the local economy. If you take a job working for these people, you can’t expect them to pause to get rid of you when you can’t even beat Wigan Athletic.

Not even beating Wigan Athletic: You can enjoy the romance of the cup all you want, but Wigan Athletic are probably going to get relegated because the quality of their players is essentially not good enough for the Premier League, however pretty their passing looks. If you have hundreds upon hundreds of millions of pounds of players and cannot beat Wigan Athletic, you don’t deserve a job – even if the players aren’t motivated, that isn’t an excuse with such a talent gap.

Not being able to motivate any players: Samir Nasri, David Silva, Vincent Kompany, Yaya Toure, Joe Hart, Mario Balotelli, Edin Dzeko, Sergio Aguero, and Gareth Barry are just a selection of the players who have underperformed compared to their peaks for Manchester City this season. The only player who has improved is James Milner, which comes with its own moral. Perhaps unwisely, Mancini’s sole motivational technique was to try to abuse his players in press conferences. For whatever unfathomable reason, this served only to exacerbate the situation, and City fell further and further behind in the title race. We are not psychologists, and so we cannot possibly work out why world class players did not take kindly to being insulted and goaded by a plainly limited manager who had consistently failed in Europe.

Being a plainly limited manager: Playing three at the back doesn’t make you Pep Guardiola. Winning scudettos when every other club was handicapped doesn’t make you a winner. Saying you’re the best manager in the country doesn’t make you Alex Ferguson.

Which brings us to: There’s been enough written about Alex Ferguson this week, that to add to it beyond a brief passage would just be narcissism and wallowing. He was a ridiculously good manager. He was a properly hard bastard. Even in his retirement speech he was managing for the future. He reminded his players to never let themselves down and talked of what the club, players and fans meant to him. So far, so glib. Then, he confirmed, despite paper stories that Wayne Rooney had not asked for a transfer a few weeks back, that in fact Rooney had just done that. Whether it is true or not doesn’t really matter – what is remarkable is that Wayne Rooney might want to leave and he might not, but that hasn’t affected Ferguson one bit. He might be from a family of boxers, but Rooney just got sucker punched. And that is the difference between Alex Ferguson and Roberto Mancini. One of them is the best manager in England, and the other is Roberto Mancini.

By Graham Ruthven

After the loss of Robin Van Persie last summer, this season was supposed to be the year Theo Walcott and Jack Wilshere finally came to the fore as Arsenal’s marquee stars. But while one looks likely to finish as the Gunner’s top scorer, the other finds himself the subject of a fiercely debated question: are Arsenal better without Wilshere? Or more specifically, are they better with Tomáš Rosický?

The purest comparison between the two sees Arsenal’s win percentage with Wilshere at 53 per cent, and at 56 per cent with Rosický. Of course, there are a number of variables that need to be accounted for. Wilshere tends to be Wenger’s preferred option against higher standard of opposition, where it is naturally more difficult to impose on the game.

But with the Gunners currently on an eight-game unbeaten run which has included clashes with Manchester United and Everton of which Rosický started five and Wilshere two (Santi Cazorla was deployed in the central attacking midfield position against Swansea), there is a case to be made that Rosický is better suited to the team Wilshere was once said to be made for.

The signing of Mikel Arteta from Everton two years ago means Arsenal need Wilshere, arguably their most technically gifted player, to be an attacking midfielder rather than the pivot in the centre of the field.

Wilshere has yet to show he can translate the energy and power he possesses in central midfield into a more advanced position. Until he can, Rosický appears to be the better option.

If Wenger wants to stick with his somewhat rigid 4-2-3-1 formation with Arteta and Aaron Ramsey as the central midfield platform, there appears to be little space for Wilshere.

Wilshere’s reputation as a box-to-box midfielder has also been called into question this season, with his defensive weaknesses exposed by the loss of Alex Song as a midfield partner.

Instead, Rosický appears to be better equipped and more at ease with the attacking midfield role Wenger needs him to fulfill. Somewhat surprisingly, Rosický even holds his own from a defensive perspective, recovering the ball 14 times against both Man Utd and QPR.

His sly movement and creative thinking has defined much of Arsenal best attacking play in the second half of the season. It’s the kind of influence that’s difficult to capture in statistics. At times he has encapsulated everything Arsenal need from the most advanced member of their midfield three.

The best demonstration of how effective Rosický can be in the central attacking midfield role came in the 2-1 win over West Brom last month. Indeed, the Czech scored both goals in the win but it was his performance elsewhere that impressed and somewhat surprised.

It is Rosický’s understanding with Cazorla that provides Arsenal with a dynamic, yet advanced, midfield platform, when the two play together and Arsenal’s opening goal at The Hawthorns illustrated this.

Cazorla took up a more central position, allowing Rosický to overlap on his left side. A square pass into the centre of midfield saw Arteta release Gervinho over the top, who came off the right wing and across the opposition defence.

Gervinho’s run afforded space for Rosický to exploit through the middle, heading home the cross-come-shot. It was the brand of intricate attacking move Arsenal have become renowned for under Wenger, but have executed all too rarely this season.

In fact, Rosický almost embodies what Arsene Wenger wants his Arsenal side to be; stylish, intelligent and energetic. Put simply, he moves Arsenal closer to Wenger’s ideal.

Positional heat maps show that when Wilshere plays in the attacking midfield role, he and Cazorla congest the same area of the pitch. Both are trained to exploit the same spaces, meaning Arsenal often reduce the size of the playing area by playing both players, something that betrays Wenger’s philosophy at the club.

Arsenal seem to struggle with the imbalance Wilshere brings to their line-up. The difficulty Wenger faces is whether to play him behind a central striker and discount his lack of creativity in attack, or deploy him as a midfield pivot where his mobility and dynamism is lost.

Despite Rosický’s slightly deeper starting position, the Czech’s goal threat appears more concise than Wilshere’s, finding the net three times in just 14 appearances, compared to just two in 32 for Wilshere.

Rosický also leads Wilshere in terms of attacking third pass completion rate, with 82 per cent compared to the Englishman’s 75 per cent, setting a fast tempo in line with the Arsenal identity.

Wenger may well have stumbled across Rosický as the attacking midfield dynamo Arsenal have lacked for much of the season, wary of rushing Wilshere back from injury, but although the Czech might be a temporary solution, for the moment he is the right one.

By Nick Dorrington

Nicolás Leoz, who this week resigned as head of CONMEBOL and as part of the FIFA Executive Committee for “health and personal” reasons, has been characterised in the English-language press as another venal South American football administrator of the ilk of Julio Grondona and Ricardo Teixeira, a buffoonish, power hungry money grabber whose first question was not what can I do for you? but what can you do for me?

It is an image facilitated by Lord Triesman, head of England’s failed bid for the 2018 World Cup, who in 2011 told a parliamentary committee that Leoz, a member of the Executive Committee since 1998, had made two ridiculous requests in exchange for his vote: a honorary knighthood from the crown and the renaming of the FA Cup in his honour.

It is certainly difficult to summarise Leoz’s time in charge of CONMEBOL without making reference to a sizable list of alleged improprieties. But it would also be fair to say that he was behind a number of positive developments during his 27-year term that mean his legacy, although somewhat tarnished, is likely to be cherished more fondly than those of the aforementioned Grondona and Teixeira, the long-serving heads of the Argentine and Brazilian federations.

When Leoz was appointed CONMEBOL president in 1986 he inherited an organisation without a permanent base and with just $5,000 to its name. A law graduate and former sports journalist, history teacher and company director, his audition for the role had come via his presidency of the Asociación Paraguaya de Fútbol. Not only had he overseen Paraguay’s qualification for the 1986 World Cup, but he had also brought order to the association, putting in place a well designed business and sporting structure.

He applied similar principles to his new position, strengthening the financial state of the federation through sales of marketing and television rights and income from sponsorships; instituting new statutes, ratified in 1990; and green lighting the building of a headquarters in Luque, to the south of the Paraguayan capital of Asunción, opened in 1998. But perhaps the key decision of his reign was to lend his support to a change in the format of the continent’s World Cup qualifiers. Before the 1998 qualification process, the 10 countries had been split into three groups, meaning that, aside from the Copa America, the smaller nations generally had just four to six competitive matches in each World Cup cycle.

The new format saw all 10 placed into one large group, guaranteeing each country 18 competitive matches per cycle. The increased television revenues allowed the lesser nations to both attract and afford better quality coaches, with figures like the Colombian Hernán Darío Gómez, who took Ecuador to their first World Cup in 2002, and the Argentine José Pastoriza, who laid the foundations for much of Venezuela’s future success, helping improve standards in the continent’s less heralded nations.

This progress is illustrated by a clear upturn in the FIFA World Rankings of the CONMEBOL nations. When the first rankings were published in 1992, only Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were in the top 25, while Venezuela were ranked a lowly 125th. Fast forward to the present and in the most recently published rankings (April 2013) six South American nations can be found in the top 25, with only Bolivia outside of the top 50. Venezuela have jumped an incredible 89 places to 36th. Collectively, the 10 nations have improved by 288 places since 1992.

But while Leoz can clearly take a large amount of credit from his positive work as head of the federation, it should also be noted that he and his closest confidantes have for too long monopolised the continent’s football policy. Leoz, Grondona and Teixeira were for a long time the only three South American members of the FIFA Executive Committee and along with CONMEBOL secretary Eduardo Deluca and vice-president Eugenio Figueredo have been charged with establishing a watertight, change resistant, axis of power.

Leoz has also been accused of taking bribes totalling upwards of $700,000 from now defunct FIFA-affiliated marketing firm ISL during the 1990s. Teixeira and his father-in-law, former FIFA president João Havelange, were, in 2012, found guilty of taking bribes from ISL relating to the award of marketing and broadcast rights for the 2002 and 2006 World Cups. The recently released findings of a FIFA internal investigation confirmed that “not inconsiderable amounts” were paid to the trio.

No further action will be taken in light of that report, as Leoz and Havelenge have now joined Teixeira in resigning from their positions within FIFA. The cabal that has long ruled CONMEBOL is finally being broken up. Deluca resigned in 2011, Teixeira in 2012 and with Leoz the latest to go, only Grondona (due to leave his post in 2015) and Figueredo remain.

Teixeira’s resignation as head of the Brazilian federation saw him replaced with vice-president José Maria Marin, whose short reign to date has been riddled with controversy. Stolen medals, incentivised dinners and accusations that he enjoyed a close relationship with the brutal military dictatorship of Brazil’s near-past have done little to suggest he is likely to be a harbinger of change. “It makes me sad to see [the CBF] being passed from one crook to another,” congressman and former national team striker Romario recently lamented.

The situation looks little better for CONMEBOL. Figueredo is not thought of particularly fondly in his native Uruguay, where he presided over the country’s federation from 1997 to 2006. Indeed, the president of Liverpool of Montevideo, José Luis Palma, publicly denounced him as a liar during a press conference towards the end of his reign. Vice president to Leoz from 1993 to 1997 and since 2006, he will assume the presidency until the end of the current mandate and also take Leoz’s place on the FIFA General Committee.

It is therefore unlikely that significant change will occur until the next set of presidential elections in 2015. It is hoped that younger candidates such as Luis Bedoya (51), who turned Dimayor, the organisers of the Colombian league, into a profitable operation before assuming control of the Colombian football federation, or Harold Mayne-Nicholls (52), who was behind the appointment of Marcelo Bielsa as Chilean national team coach, would bring a more modern approach to the organisation.

Leoz will certainly go down in history as one of CONMEBOL’s most successful presidents, having brought financial stability to the federation and facilitated on-field improvement in the continent’s national teams. But with his reign concluded and the majority of the old guard who have stood loyally at his side also on the way out, CONMEBOL can perhaps now look to a future where institutional success can be allied to institutional transparency.

By Andi Thomas and Alex Netherton

Guys! Guys! Exciting news! Just below the Premier League is another league! You know relegation? This is where those teams go! Wolves are here! Well, they were; they’ve gone somewhere else now. It’s called ‘The Championship’, which is a bit weird, but then one of us calls his penis ‘Lord Toffingham’, so who are we to judge?

It turns out that this is also where promoted teams like ‘Reading’ (pronounced just like reading) come from, and this weekend was the conclusion of the annual race to get relegated from the Premier League next time around. And for those jaded souls that spend most of the season following the top-flight, like us, and you, this was like discovering that the entire season’s been played at the wrong speed, and that the lugubrious death march of a sport we’ve been enduring is supposed to be a jaunty little toe-tapper.

Watford are losing! No, hang on, they’ve got one back. But wait, Hull are winning! No, Hull are drawing, sorry, I got confused. Watford have got a mascot in goal! Somebody else’s mascot! Is that allowed? As it stands! Where even is Peterborough? Are those my trousers? Why are the Cardiff Reds wearing blue? Is Steve Bruce crying? Is Steve Bruce melting? Is Steve Bruce so distraught with tension that he’s smearing his own excrement on the walls of the dugout? No, no, that’s just Nutella. Why has he got Nutella? The Hull fans have invaded the pitch! The game isn’t over! As it stands! They’ve kidnapped the referee! No, he’s back, and he’s given both sides a penalty! Where are my trousers? What on earth is Huddersfield? Have Nottingham City pipped Leicester Forest? No! Yes! Leeds, eh? As it stands! How old is Kevin Phillips? Can I borrow your trousers? As it stands! As it stands! As it stands! Steve Bruce can’t see the wood for the trees, he’s just criticized the referee on the day he got promoted! What a tit-end!

And breathe.

You sort of hope that none of the celebrating Hull players found time over the weekend to actually sit and watch the league they’ve managed to clamber into. They might well have found themselves wondering what the point of it all was; why they’ve spent all season trying to escape a delirious mess for the sake of a tiresome farce. Apart from Reading (still pronounced reading)—a team who only got promoted by accident and have already been relegated—Saturday was thin, thin gruel. And by the time the soupiest of Super Sundays was limping to an inelegant close, the nation was faced with the very real prospect that the Premier League might not be the most exciting league in the country, let alone the universe.

Fortunately for the sake of us ~~diarists~~ all, David Luiz did a Bad Thing. Thanks, David! Thanks!

If you’d fallen asleep by that point, a brief recap. David Luiz and Rafael da Silva are tussling by the corner flag. Some Manchester United fans, lacking any purpose or dignity, have been swapping screenshots that purport to show something of an elbow from the hairier of the two Brazilians, which wouldn’t be out of character but isn’t really important. Rafael has a kick, Luiz falls on the floor, the sexier of the two Brazilians is shown a small, stiff, red rectangle, and he leaves. None of which is particularly interesting.

But! While Luiz was lying on the floor, he smiled. He grinned. He may even—oh, calumny!—have chuckled. The dirty foreign bastard.

Let’s be clear, it’s not that he was pretending to be hurt. People don’t care about that, because if they did, then there wouldn’t be a single game that didn’t end with most of the participants getting it in the neck from all plus sundry. Having got it in the neck, naturally they’d fall on the floor writhing around, grasping a part of their body close to but markedly different from that which had been hit, but hey: that’s football. One of us once attended a baseball game, and the sight of a batter smashing a fastball into his own foot was greeted by a hoot of derision from one of his own fans. “Get up! This isn’t a soccer game!” It later turned out that the foot was fractured in three places.

Football players pretend to be injured in the same way that fish live in water and bricks fall through the air. Whether they should or not is another argument, except it isn’t, because they shouldn’t. But Luiz’s crime, like all the truly media-friendly crimes, isn’t so much in the doing as in the manner of doing. By grinning rather than observing the forms—the agonised twitch, the careful wince, the gingerish rise supported by the physio, the marked-but-rapidly vanishing limp—he’s exposed that the problem isn’t with the cheating. They’re all cheats, all the time, and nobody cares. The problem is the failure to cheat with the appropriate seriousness. The problem is here that you simply are not allowed to break the fourth wall. We should not be reminded in such a Brechtian manner that what we’re watching really is a play.

There’s the sport—you know, the football with the goals—and then there’s also the circus. Most people care about the sport, and really care about the circus, they just don’t like to be reminded of it. We are all sullied by getting so involved in it, we don’t want to realize these players really do just see it as a game. The free-spirited, monied, regularly-sexed, happy-go-lucky scamps. Where has it all gone wrong for them? If that is moral failure, consider us tempted.

Roll that notion around your head for a bit. The Premier League, where even the stupid and the snide must be taken ultra-seriously, all the time. Check the small print, Hull. Consult some lawyers. Surely you don’t have to do this to yourselves.

By Andi Thomas and Alex Netherton

Diminishing returns is a concept that we are all familiar with. However, we will now go on to describe it in some detail. There is, for example, this series, the Diary of Love and Hate. What was once a promising and original review of the week’s Premier League action quickly turned into a cemetery for jokes. Not only were we drunk and strung out when we wrote it, we were miserable and at our day jobs when we edited it. There it was—a mixture of incompetence and resentment, distilled into 800 or so words, fewer if it was possible to get away with it. Diminishing Returns—that’s what we’ll call it when we come back next season.

Diminishing returns is not just limited to football though, it plagues our everyday lives. You know why the rich are so protective of their money—because money loses its novelty value, especially when it’s something you have plenty of. Knowing that your surfeit of cash is not something that makes you happy is why rich people stow it away; at least they can stop people enjoying the novelty of being able to buy temporary happiness, and because they’re scared everyday people will have it in themselves to do something more constructive with it. Diminishing returns, the ability of human nature to turn something of value and use into something that actually pains the soul, we’re all aware of that.

Just look at divorce rates. They may have peaked but they’re far higher than a settled and content world would ever produce, and certainly one where true love really did exist. We are now not just a divorcing world, but one that has settled into a routine of serial monogamy. We find one relationship, we enjoy the high, and then diminishing return sets in. The sex peaks and then relents. The quality drops, the commitment to making the other person satisfied stops being the priority and becomes a bargaining tool to be exchanged for similar favours. The amount they talk is no longer a subject of amusement, it is that the very sound of their voice reminds you that as bad as being alone is, it’s at least better than being in a room with her anymore. She’s a nice person, yet she makes you unhappy. That’s diminishing returns. That the concept is so inescapable is what makes diminishing returns such an easy concept to grasp, and a memorable phrase to invoke.
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By Andi Thomas and Alex Netherton

No, we’re not going to talk about it.

Instead, we’re going to talk about Tottenham, and Manchester City, and Andre Villas-Boas. It turns out that the Iberian sexpot with a voice like a pepper-grinder is quite good at this management business: his substitutions changed first the shape of his team, then the dynamic of the entire game. Particular praise is due to Tom Huddlestone, who neatly demonstrated that moving your body around a lot is all well and good, Scott Parker, but it’s better to be able to move the ball.

His opposite number Roberto Mancini, meanwhile, brought on own-brand winger Scott Sinclair, then deployed Joleon Lescott up front, the first time a dirty protest has been broadcast on national television. It just goes to show that LUIS SUAREZ BIT BRANISLAV IVANOVIC! HE BIT HIM ON THE ARM! WITH HIS TEETH!

Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, Tottenham’s win, along with Arsenal’s win over Fulham and Chelsea’s draw against Liverpool—careful—mean that the Race For A Higher Level Of Television Income Next Season is tighter than the CLENCHED JAW OF A DERANGED SAVAGE USING THE TEETH IN HIS FACE TO WORRY THE ARM OF A FELLOW PROFESSIONAL, LIKE A SQUIRREL WITH A HEADACHE SAVAGING A WILLOW TREE!

Dammit. Down the bottom of the table, QPR are now so buggered that even Harry Redknapp has come to terms with the fact that his magical powers of escapology may not shield him from at least some of the responsibility. (Joke: of course they will.) But for a man who was once so keen to serve his country, his team’s failure to beat Stoke represents the very worst dereliction of duty. We’re trying to make the world a better place here, Harry, and it’s time you started pulling your weight. Or have you bitten off more than you can CHEW CHEW CHEW CHEW CHEW! ON IVANOVIC’S ARM! WITH THE TEETH IN HIS FACE! WHAT’S HE DOING? WHY IS HE DOING THAT?

Gah! Sorry! Right! Something else…Paolo di Canio did some celebrating, as Everton did some capitulating. If only Thatcher had dropped in a couple of knee slides towards the end, she could have gone to her grave in peace. Wigan are still in trouble, though such is the power of their reputation that should they go down, nobody will actually notice, and they’ll still end up in next season’s preview supplements. Andy Carroll, meanwhile, continues to refine his own brand of equine berzerkery to a sharp point, AS SHARP AS THE FROTHING INCISORS OF LUIS SUAREZ AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HE BIT HIM! WHAT?

Er…

Um…

FOR THE SECOND TIME IN HIS CAREER!

Well…

Okay, okay, okay. We’ll talk about it. There is an odd dynamic to the outrage in which we are swimming, a kind of blanket insistence on the moralistic absolute. This would obviously be appropriate for something like, say, racial abuse, which is still getting caviled and caveated into irrelevance by the remarkably white world of football journalism. It’s been a good day for the words “claimed”, and “alleged” and “controversial”, and for the placing of scare quotes around the words “racial abuse”, and for neatly eliding or completely overlooking Suarez’s own admissions regarding the matter. Perhaps nobody likes being shouted at by Liverpool fans. Or perhaps nobody cares.

Everybody cares about this, though. Really and certainly cares, with a white-hot sense of righteousness that feel deeply incongruous. Because as well as being an act for for which he should have been sent off, and as well as being an act for which he will be banned, it was (and still is) very, very funny. Perhaps it shouldn’t be, but then, we don’t make the rules. The prevailing tone of fatally-twisted knickers is out of step with the honest response.

Part of the humour comes from the oddity of the thing. Biting is transgressive in a way that more straightforward and traditional forms of violence aren’t. It’s objectively worse to break somebody’s leg than chew on their bicep, but it’s a lot less peculiar. Kicking one another is what footballers do; biting is reserved for vampires in fairy stories, junkies in American news items, and Hannibal Lecter.

Another part comes from the fact that this is Suarez, for whom the second half—gorgeous assist, stupid handball, quick munch on an opponent, poached winner—was more-or-less a best-of, though thankfully he decided not to gob off at Ryan Bertrand. This is not to say it’s a good thing to be doing, or to argue that Suarez won’t deserve the lengthy ban that’s coming his way. It’s just to acknowledge that it’s possible to shake your head and laugh at the same time. Human beings are not binary creatures.

Things, as they are wont to do, are happening. Opinion pieces are falling out of the internet, most of them insisting Liverpool have to sell; this makes little to no sense considering that the last time he did this, they bought him. Graeme Souness is condemning onfield violence, apparently without irony. The PFA have offered him anger management counselling, which of course worked so well for Joey Barton. Suarez, for his part, apologized to Ivanovic immediately—well, no, he apologised later in the evening; his immediate reaction was to feign a limp—and then made sure his ~~sponsors~~ Twitter followers were aware that he was disgusted by his own behaviour. Patrice Evra is still waiting.

One question remains tantalisingly unanswered: How on earth did Ivanovic resist the urge to lamp him?

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Posted by admin under Diary of Love/Hate, EPL on Apr 29, 2013

This is a Diary of Love/Hate: Premier League Week 31

Posted by admin under Diary of Love/Hate on Apr 22, 2013

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