THE PREMIER LEAGUE is broken. It is engorged on its own wealth, like a Hanoverian king too fat for his corset.
It has stumbled through this season’s European competitions and now lies face down, snoring happily.
Weeks after it agreed a record €7.1 billion (£5.1bn) TV rights deal, just two Premier League clubs out of the seven that began the season in Europe can confidently expect to survive the opening skirmishes of the knockout stages. More money than sense. Nice but dim. Rich and thick. The Bertie Wooster of football nations.
Now, drawing pat conclusions from the Champions League is an annual ritual.We paint broad strokes across the map of Europe every spring, much like the opening credits of Dad’s Army.Italy in retreat, Spain advances, Germany on the offensive (careful!).
Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Guardiola?
This ignores the fact that much of what happens in European competition, even aside from pure blind luck (see Chelsea, 2012), is the result of specific scenarios at individual clubs. Inter under Jose Mourinho, Pep’s Barca, Klopp at Dortmund: coaching auteurs rather than emblems of national excellence. Were Qatar’s financial juicing to result in Paris St-Germain winning the Champions League, what would that say about French football?
Still, there are things to extract from the type of English collapse usually associated with their cricket team. City first. Why, in their first leg against Barcelona, did Manuel Pellegrini come over all Field Marshal Haig and send his team over the top to certain doom?
In last season’s corresponding fixture they timidly ceded a 2-0 first leg home defeat despite deploying a sturdy 4-5-1 formation, with Gael Clichy and Aleksandr Kolarov as a left back duplex unit.
It seems likely that Pellegrini, having betrayed his attacking principles once, was not going to go all tactickey a second time. It was time for a statement, he thought. “We are champions of England. Enough of the scrabbling about with the CSKA Moscows of this world; bring me the head of Lionel Messi!” Fade to black.
Rather than following the familiar blueprint of late-period Arsene Wenger – beating the teams they’re supposed to, losing to those they’re not – Arsenal cocked up what most observers felt was a great chance to escape their long-running last sixteen rut. They seemed astonished to meet a well-organised, hard-working Monaco team, and now require a Monte Carlo heist befitting the plot of Ocean’s Eleven.
The Europa League casualties are harder to make sweeping judgements about; English clubs have yet to find the sweet spot where team-sheets consisting of pimply academy products and European success meet. Since the tournament’s rejigging in 2009-10, Premier League clubs have been semi- finalists on just three occasions, compared to seven from Spain.
What appears to have been lost, by all but Mourinho, is what Rafa Benitez described as “the management of 180 minutes”. Good old Rafa — remember him? In the Premier League’s 2005-09 Euro heyday, his approach of carefully arranging the pieces on the board to tackle a specific opponent, “the tactical preparation needed to overcome opponents expected to best us,” as he put it, was the prevailing wisdom.
Benitez, Mourinho, and even Alex Ferguson – or at least, while Carlos Queiroz was his assistant - were enthusiastic subscribers. To think, Arsene Wenger navigated Arsenal to the 2006 Champions League final without conceding a goal in the knockout stages!
Such dour virtues as patience, caution, preparedness, application, industry were de rigeur. But the ability to grind and squeak through two-legged European ties doesn’t hold much water in today’s Premier League.
Finishing in the top four – the KPI for managers of the top clubs – seems to require a different set of skills. Put simply, it is more important to skittle the fifteen or so mediocre-to-terrible Premier League teams on a regular basis than to edge gripping tactical battles with your nearest rivals.
For example, Arsenal won just one of their six games against fellow top four teams last season, but comfortably finished in the sacred spots by freewheeling past the chaff. Chelsea, on the other hand, reached a Champions League semi-final with no strikers, but couldn’t break down Crystal Palace.
Like the old British aristocracy, complacency and privilege could be the Premier League’s downfall. The reassuring glug of TV money pouring into the game suggests nothing is wrong. But while England has a comfortable lead over Italy in the UEFA coefficient table, the gap is narrowing, and will close further when Italy’s current five-club assault on the Europa League is added in.
Losing a Champions League place to dowdy old Serie A would be nervously received in the non-petrochemically-assisted Premier League boardrooms. With Rafa long gone, only his old foe at Chelsea appears equipped for the European grapple.
Rich and thick? It’s a pickle worthy of Wodehouse, but this time it’s Jose, not Jeeves to the rescue.
Luis Garcia is our studio guest for the Real Madrid v Schalke second leg on Tuesday. It will be his second appearance after doing the Besiktas v Liverpool game recently. When he arrived in the building, Liverpool-supporting TV3 staff emerged from offices, stationery cupboards, air vents.
It was like an Anfield-themed episode of the Walking Dead. I’ve never seen a more enthusiastic reaction to a guest, Garcia’s stock still enjoying its post-2005 high.
It was a reminder that those players lucky enough to succeed at a club like Liverpool enjoy a sort of immortality, a gilded afterlife of photos, autographs and handshakes. Like old Star Trek actors, their lives are one long Comic-Con, but without the drawbacks of typecasting.
Tommy Martin presents live UEFA Champions League on Tuesday nights on TV3.
