Have You Heard The One About The Fox, The Floodlights, The Drone and the Mic Pack?
Have You Heard The One About The Fox, The Floodlights, The Drone and the Mic Pack?
On Mental Health and Enjoying Football
I wanted to start this week with a short meditation on football and mental health. There's nothing in here that's too detailed or even that downbeat, but feel free to skip this and go straight to The Week in Ball.
Without wanting this to get too personal and drive you all away, it's been a tough week. The Full Moon fulfilled her promise of a chaotic Monday which started a week of low mood and sadness, which, again without getting too personal (although if you follow me on Twitter you probably know), could be the culmination of any number of things.
On Friday the Athletic published this piece by Katie Whyatt on her own mental health struggles, struggles much worse than mine, and how this affects her and her work.. It's a beautiful piece of writing (I apologise to those without a sub for always using Athletic links but they really do have some great writers) which really gets to the crux of the numbness that's so central to depression and how difficult it is to get enjoyment (or to be honest, any strong emotion) from something you love when you feel down.
I mention this because I'm finding football hard at the moment, when normally it's my one constant joy. I'm struggling to brush off the banter, find anything funny or even get comfort from measured analysis, which usually helps if I'm feeling hot-headed or rattled about something. Jokes I may previously have laughed at are leaving me cold, I don't want to tweet about certain aspects of it and even went as far as a 24 hour muting of a couple of words just for some peace.
I'm writing this on Friday (21st), before the games for the week kick off, so who knows, by Monday everything might be dandy again, such is the nature of the beast, but I think I'll leave this in regardless, in case anyone else is feeling the same, because it can be useful to know you're not alone.
It's also a reminder that no matter what front someone is presenting, you don't know what's going on behind closed doors. It felt like a watershed moment the other week when Marcus Rashford was off his game and the pundit said "we don't know what's going on in his personal life". I think that was an important acknowledgement and a step past the usual criticism of players who aren't playing at the top of their game. Sticking with United, I also like that Victor Lindelof was given compassionate leave following a break in at his house. It may seem a silly thing to be pleased by and I'm sure players have taken this kind of leave for various reasons for years but it was just so simply and honestly said that it felt notable and we need to keep having the conversation about the mental health and general wellbeing of players and their families. They're people and it's a tough lifestyle, even if you have riches beyond your wildest dreams.
The Week In Ball
We start this week with a brief nod to the various European cup competitions which have been taking place recently. Following a series of upsets and dramatic endings I now only have one dog in one fight and that's Milan in the Coppa Italia, who play Lazio in the quarters. Everyone else (Arsenal, Dortmund, Barcelona) is out. Shout out to my guys Pedri and Ferran Torres though for scoring the Barca goals on Thursday.
Now that's out the way I just have one question: Football, what the hell were you on this weekend?!
We begin on Friday. A relegation six pointer at Vicarage Road between Watford and Norwich.
The first half was extremely boring. Nothing to see here. Dull dull dull. Then within six minutes of the restart Josh Sargent scored. Josh Sargent, yeah, him from the Bundesliga, the American kid with all the ginger curls, the dude that a weird amount of people on Twitter seem to severely dislike.
OK, game on. This could get interesting. And it did, but if you don't know what happened it was in a way you will never guess. At 60 minutes half of the floodlights blew. Play was suspended. Mike Dean didn't seem to know what was going on or what the protocol was; the pitch was visible and until the lights briefly flickered back on again and the difference was noticeable, it didn't seem that bad; Jamie Carragher lost his shit.
Eventually the teams decided by mutual consent to continue the game in the half light, which was mostly fine other than some big shadows on the pitch. However almost immediately after the third restart Josh Sargent scored again. Yeah, him from etc. etc.
At 78 minutes, Emmanuel Dennis got sent off causing a howl heard across the globe from all the Fantasy Football managers who'd got over excited at the thought of Watford having a double gameweek and had drafted him in, the loudest cries from those who captained or triple captained him. (Yes, I got sucked in, but I didn't captain him)
To top it off, Juraj Kucka scored an own goal leaving Watford with a 0-3 loss and Ranieri in an extremely precarious position. Immediate thought? Rafa. Claudio to Everton. Perhaps he works better with a better squad, which Everton do marginally have and look what he did with Leicester...
If you think that was a palaver, on Saturday Brentford's game against Wolves was stopped by a drone flying overhead. Protocol for this situation was clear, it constituted a health and safety risk so the players were taken inside for a period of 19 minutes while the drone was dealt with.
And then...
Oh and there was also a sending off for Brentford, just to top it off.
Down in League Two, the game at Leyton Orient was stopped by an errant London fox deciding to have a run around on the pitch.
Pretty much everywhere else there was little incident to mention (je refuse to talk about refereeing decisions). Goals were few and far between until Sunday when Liverpool beat Palace 1-3 and Chelsea beat Spurs 2-0 with a wonderstrike from recent Thirst Trap Hakim Ziyech (watching it over you know it's going in from the way he just nonchalantly stands there after striking the ball).
In the other Sunday games Brighton fought back to hold Leicester to a 1-1 draw and Arsenal couldn't find a way past the stultifying block that is Burnley. I'm really glad that match wasn't on TV.
The most notable result was Southampton doing a 'four pointer' over City, holding them to a second draw, after a first Premier League goal for the absolute sweetheart that is Kyle Walker-Peters. What a treat of a first goal for a lovely seeming guy.
In La Liga Barcelona managed to scrape a win against Alaves in a terribly turgid performance, while Real were held by Elche, 2-2. Because of Hector Bellerin and their delightful Twitter account this is also now a Betis fan newsletter and it was great to see them spank Espanyol 1-4.
Barca are now fifth and if they can beat Atleti when football returns from the Winter/international break on the 4th Feb, they'll be back in a Champions League spot, while Betis are holding strong in third with deadly rivals Sevilla in second.
In Serie A the Cagliari Fiorentina game was incident packed and a bit bonkers. The commentator on BT Sport was like a diet Jonathan Pearce, incredulous at every turn about what was happening. He simply couldn't get over how much the ref was talking, and he was right, he really loved to go on. The game ended 1-1, a disappointment following Fiorentina's recent form (though they were without Vlahovic so it showed his importance), with a red card and two saved penalties.
Napoli beat Salernitana 4-1 to go second on goal difference after Milan failed to break down Juventus, the game ending 0-0, while Jose Mourinho's Roma had another high scoring match, beating Empoli 2-4. Tammy Abraham was yet again on the score sheet with a brace and Oliviera is looking like a good signing.
The Bundesliga seemed to have stolen all the goals this weekend, starting with poor, beleaguered Eintracht losing 0-2 to Arminia Bielefeld. There were a few 2-1s and 2-0s, Dortmund held on to beat Hoffenheim 2-3 and Leverkusen and Bayern scored for fun winning their games 5-1 and 1-4 respectively. Only Bochum and newsletter-soft-spot-holders Köln were drawn, each scoring two goals.
As I alluded to earlier we now go into an almost two week break across Europe, variously considered a Winter or international break. There is of course still the conclusion of the AFCON to watch, although those matches will get fewer (obvs) as we go through the rounds.
Now, I confess I've watched very very little of the tournament so far. I've been keeping an eye on the scores and have enjoyed watching people on Twitter watching and reacting but as yet haven’t really watched anything of the games live.
However, I did tune in to the Burkina Faso v Gabon penalties last night and they were a lot of fun. There were some great ones, some awful ones, some pure agony in the crowd and then, when Burkina Faso finally secured the win at 7-6, this:
Whether there's a newsletter next week or not depends mainly on being struck with inspiration for a theme issue or finding a subject to write about at length, so I might have my own winter pause until everything kicks off again at the end of next week. Keep your eyes on Twitter and your inboxes in the meantime though!
(basically putting this here because it's a good tweet but also it represents the mini break that's being foist upon us, where we have to do things we don't really want to because our normal entertainment is gone)
Kick Off
This week, instead of looking at one specific thing, I thought I'd go through a few popular phrases and their meanings and finish up on some formation stuff. As with anything, football is littered with idioms and phrases and acronyms and so on that you only know if you know. Sometimes I hear people talking about stuff, even now, and I just think what the fuck are you on about? I'm certainly not going to claim any of these are obscure or necessarily difficult to work out, but they are ones that have some kind of direct or tangential reference to stuff that's been happening over the last week, or I've suddenly noticed cropping up a lot recently, sorry if you already know them but don't be mad, remember The Curse of Knowledge:
Fox in the Box: after Liverpool's Carabao Cup win at Arsenal I saw numerous tweets and headlines referring to Jota as a 'fox in the box'. I'm not going to lie, the first time I heard this was on that awful Paddy Power advert from a year or so ago, where the guy tries to be inclusive with his language and keeps mucking it up. Anyway, the phrase refers to "a player who is an excellent goal scorer when positioned in the penalty area.". Different to a goalhanger or a poacher, the fox in the box is skilled at deceiving the opposition with their positioning and getting into great spots to score.
Rabona: again, something I was unaware of until Lamela's goal in the North London Derby last year. This is one of those things where the TL exploded with admiration and shock at the skill and I was like, what? For a start it happened so quickly I hadn't noticed he'd done anything unusual and for a second I'd not heard the phrase before. Whether this was down to their scarcity or my lack of attention I don't know. So I googled it and discovered it's when you use the opposite foot to the one you might be more reasonably expected to kick with, in order to reach behind the leading leg and strike the ball. Honestly I've no idea why you'd do it, it seems unnecessarily flouncy and risky but fair enough Erik, you pulled it off and won the FIFA Puskás Award.
Remontada: sticking with Spurs recent example on this one. It's something I see people generally like to excitedly yell when it happens, either ironically before it gets pulled off or genuinely when it actually happens. It " is the Spanish word for 'recovery' or 'comeback' and it is used to describe a remarkable turnaround in fortunes by a team that had been on course to lose". So last week when Spurs came back from being down 2-1 to Leicester at 90+4 only to score two goals and win, this was a remontada.
I also wanted to mention this tweet from TSF Podcast. I mentioned this in reference to Swindon and also Finland in the Euros but here's a really great visual showing how it looks when a team's formation is extremely explicit and rigid. For me it helps to occasionally see teams do this so you can try and spot it better when it gets a bit messier. I think I've mentioned this before but another good thing to do to get used to formations and positioning is to chose one player and keep your eyes on them, regardless of what else is going on (so maybe not when you're watching your team!) and watch what they do, how they move, how they react to the ball and other players.
The {Offside} Thirst Trap
The Best FIFA Men's Goalkeeper, Champions League winner, FA Cup runner up, Senegal's Number 1 but also... hot af. I mean come on, what a gorgeous man he is. Imagine a hug from him? So tall and kind and as a goalie of course he has a huge arm span and he'd wrap you up and everything would be OK for a moment. And his smile! Beautiful. To paraphrase Marge Simpson, I just think he's neat.
Anyway, here's a lovely video of his skills and of the Senegal team celebrating his FIFA win, which was announced while they were in Cameroon for the AFCON.
Yes, he's the second Chelsea goalie who's been on here but fair play to them, they've picked well.
Merch Stand
We may all laugh at Arsenal for the amount of kit/gear drops they do, and rightly so, it's fair game, but for the most part we do only have three actual kits for a season and the rest is training gear or seasonal like a Christmas jumper for eg.
Napoli though? Napoli have got their home kit, their away kit, their third kit, their Maradona kit, their Halloween kit and now... their Flames kit. And they've played in all of them.
Do I hate this kit? No. Do I like it? Also no. It's fine. It looks like they're advertising British Gas
Extra Time
Scrolling through my bookmarks on Twitter the other day I found a couple of things I was going to include the other week but forgot, so here they are, along with a few other bits and bobs I've collated:
After 11 weeks away, this is how Brentford goalie David Raya came back to training...
I can't remember who sent me this but thank you for thinking of me as a kit person and tagging me. And I agree with the tweet, these kits are sweet - do click through, there are four to see. Though why these are cool but so many people hate the Puma away/third kits I don't know... (I am not one of these people, I've grown to like them, I think they looked bad as a flat lay but actually work on the pitch).
This is very amusing, I believe Harry is being abducted by an alien beam?
Barca's instagram admin tried to do one of those posts where you can swipe across two pics and it's essentially seamless. They fucked up. (Sidenote: who knew you could screenshot while swiping on IG?!)
Important Addendum
It's ✨my birthday✨ on Saturday (the 29th). I share my big day with Romario, Turkish International and second TWUTAB Thirst Trap Yusuf "YY" Yazici and BT Sport Score's non-league correspondent Danny Jamieson... and Oprah. She's not football related, just someone pretty cool to share your birthday with.
Anyway the point is, feel free to hit me up on Twitter with good wishes and fun pics or gifs or links. And don't forget, all my links are down below if you want to buy me a "birthday pint" :)
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