As I write, Sky Sports’ Super Sunday game is Middlesbrough versus Watford is about to start. The greatest league in the world – the Premier League (yeah, right) – is not exactly living up to its self-accredited status. I had other things to do today, like listening to music, reading the newspaper and watching the grass grow. All three were, I suspect, more interesting than Middlesbrough versus Watford.
I am not a connoisseur of the Premier League as a whole. I watch every time Liverpool are on, hardly at all when anyone else is on, unless they are playing Liverpool, of course. I watched the pre-game hype in which the nondescript presenter (a nondescript presenter is still better than Richard Keys) quizzed Jamie Redknapp about all manner of things he is good at, like clichés and being bland, leaving trivia like team selection and tactics to no one in particular. Even I could tell that this was not a game that would attract a record audience to Sky.
I listened to Radio Five Live where Alan Green and Chris Sutton were definitely calling it like it was, which is to say poor. I had heard of hardly any of the players, almost all of whom were journeymen foreign players, and the few I had heard of – Negredo was one – were “shocking” or “wretched”. Switching on Sky at half-time was priceless because the TV panel could not deny this was an awful game. Redknapp, who will surely face a disciplinary for this, called the game “poor”, which in Sky Speak means as bad a game as you could ever see. There were no highlights as such, just a discussion how the referee should have sent someone off, but didn’t. After a minute of this, I did the decent thing: I went to Asda.
Alan Green was still on my radio, thanking listeners for sticking with the programme. Green has his critics, but when a game is truly terrible, there is no one better. There was not a single saving grace to the game and he had not seen a worse team this season, apart from maybe Sunderland. Negredo, suggested Green, could yet atone for his lifeless, disinterested performance by scoring a late equaliser, but you knew his heart wasn’t in it, just like Negredo’s.
None of this was any surprise, was it? Look at the fixtures and this game stood out as a dud. It was always going to be rubbish and so it proved to be. It also summed up the Premier League, with two teams ram-packed (as Jeremy Corbyn might put it) with run-of-the-mill overseas players here for the payday and nothing else, taking the places of promising but unproven young English players, in search of the owner’s quick fix, which never works.
Tomorrow, it’s Liverpool versus Manchester United, or Klopp versus Mourinho as the entire media will frame it. It will form Sky’s snappily named Monday Night Football show and, you can bet, the pundits will be ex Liverpool and United players. There will be some far better foreign players on duty and even a few half-decent English ones and Martin Tyler will soon be gushing about “the best league in the world”. But not if he’d seen Middlesbrough and Watford.
