Gavin Cooney

THE COLUMNIST’S GREATEST enemy is not AI or libel laws or hard work. It is nostalgia. 

The thing is like Japanese knotweed: nostalgia’s tendrils are always sprouting, threatening to overwhelm us and then growing back twice as strong. 

Hence all that’s necessary for the triumph of nostalgia is that good columnists do nothing. 

We publish this as a disclaimer to say we have wrestled nostalgia out of the way here and are still confident in saying that the very elite end of professional football in England ain’t what it used to be.

The Premier League has never been of a higher technical quality but, let’s be honest here, the most recent weekend was a wretched spectacle, where the only flow outside of a series of stop-start VAR interventions was a miasma of bloodless, short and risk-free passing we saw in Sunday’s games between Brighton and Man City and then between Liverpool and Arsenal. 

The VAR interventions of Saturday were maddening; the style of football on Sunday was deathly dull. 

The former is the product of a group of referees and officials, and the latter was created by coaches. Both constituencies are united in a belief that the new resources at their disposal allows them to submit the game to their control, and all the game needs is more intervention from outside. 

The referees’ instrument of intervention is VAR, while coaches’ means of intervention are their highly-calibrated and tightly-controlled systems of play. 

You can draw a line to this point from the summer of 2019.

That was when VAR was first introduced to the Premier League, where it remains despite its being exposed as a fundamental failure. The disallowing of Fulham’s goal against Chelsea was an example of why VAR does not work: it cannot work. 

Rodrigo Muniz’ accidental contact with Trevoh Chalobah was hardly worth remarking upon amid a fast and flowing attacking move, as there was simply too much else going on to focus. But the VAR’s job isn’t to watch the game: they are watching for fouls and so once they showed it to the referee out of context of the whole move, he had to disallow it. 

This is patent rubbish. Accidental collisions happen all the time in a fast and physical game like football – hence the whole point of the fast and physical bit – and you’ll find dictionary definitions of fouls in the preface to virtually every goal scored. This leads us to the ludicrous premise of VAR: its effective use relies on turning a blind eye to almost everything it is there to see. 

The PGMOL said it was an incorrect intervention and the goal should have been allowed, and stood down the VAR official from his next game, which was Liverpool-Arsenal. We’re not sure this was much of a punishment, given it saved him exposure from the dreary modernity served up at Anfield.

This brings us to the second great consequence of the summer of 2019.

It was then that the game agreed to a law change to allow, for the first time, goal kicks to be played short and within the penalty area. Previously, a goal kick had to at least travel outside the box. This was a reaction to the short-passing that had evolved since Pep Guardiola conquered the world with Barcelona, and so given goalkeepers had by now learned to be good with their feet, the lawmakers figured they might as well give them a chance to use their new talents. 

An unintended consequence, however, was Sunday’s drab offering at Anfield. Whereas teams have continued to cleave to the Guardiola principle of hogging the ball, they now do so in different areas. Guardiola’s early sides controlled the game in the opposition’s final third, though could be undone by the Jurgen Klopp principle of pressing and swift counter-attacks into all the space left behind.

As Klopp’s methods spread, the best coaching minds got to work with how to counter the counter-attack. Their idea: let’s leave no space into which to counter. This is what Liverpool and Arsenal did for most of Sunday’s game, playing short passes in their own half. The benefit to this plan: if the opposition press, we can play around them into the space behind them. And if we lose the ball, hey, we have lots of bodies standing around here to avoid giving up a chance.

The change to the goal kick law gives teams more control and enables them to do this from a standing start, meaning long swathes of games descend into the kind of passing stalemate once parodied by the Simpsons. 

Given Liverpool showed more ambition in the second half, Arsenal were this style’s most egregious arbiters at Anfield, frequently turning down their own counter-attacking opportunities so as to avoid being caught on the counter themselves. What the rest of us call caution, coaches like Arteta call control. 

With Eberechi Eze and Martin Odegaard left on the bench, Arsenal limited Liverpool to almost nothing and themselves to just as little.

But then Dominik Szoboszlai smacked in a 32-yard free-kick to leave Arsenal with nothing, and show the folly of Arsenal’s cautious approach. This game cannot be completely controlled, so there’s no point in sacrificing so much attacking potential to do so. 

Arteta is the most control-craving of all the managers in the Premier League at the moment, but Szoboszlai’s free-kick went to show that he is waging a fruitless war against the inevitable, like some transhumanist trying to cheat death by uploading their brain to the cloud as they search for a younger and fresh corporeal form. (To that end: these transhumanists looking for a second body could do worse than look at many of these young and physical giants Arteta has been recruiting at Arsenal.)

The joylessness of the control game has been highlighted too by Jack Grealish’s giddy start to life at Everton, where he has immediately become the creative hub of the team  and can’t resist posting pictures of himself smiling and locked in the embrace of Everton fans. 

On the ball, City used Grealish like the Irish State uses a tribunal at the eruption of some national scandal: the direction in which to kick the thing in order to slow it down. Guardiola’s biographer described Grealish as the “rest station”, to whom City passed the ball to buy time to assume their next methodically-drilled position. 

Guardiola and Arteta are among the best coaches in the game, but all things in moderation: their control game has limits which even they cannot overcome, including the waning enthusiasm of those of us paying to be entertained by it.

The game cannot be controlled and the chaos should be embraced.

The summer of 2019 has proved to be the summer of unintended consequences.