English Premier League matches - September 12-13, 2009

Sports coverage across the globe has taken an odd sheen in the age of the internet. There is so much more information available to everyone that not very much escapes our notice. One can look up scores from around the world and hundreds of goal highlights. I love seeing the goals, but don’t really enjoy reading all the anonymous negativity and pointless punditry that the internet seems to facilitate. Like many teams in other sports, there are certain football clubs that I can’t stand, and many of them have very strong winning traditions and amazing pedigrees. There are other perpetual underachievers that I take some amount of schadenfreude in watching the endless suffering of their fans. My personal sporting experiences as a fan and player are more on the “perpetual suffering” side as opposed to the “winner” side of things. I find that people that win too much, and expect it, and carry themselves as “winners” are lame. This gets into a philosophical area that is way too weighty/boring for a football site.

Still, in the tradition of the more encyclopedic Albion Road, we want to keep the language respectful when it comes to football clubs, no matter how evil or noble they may appear. Since this is the internet the rules may change at any time, but that’s what we’re going for.

The most interesting stories from the EPL from a relatively neutral perspective will usually have to involve at least one team in the top four and a pretender to the throne. In this case, Tottenham Hotspur lost their 100% record. Spurs started with a bang; a first-minute strike from Jermain Defoe made it look like Tottenham Hotspur was truly on the ascendancy, but Man U answered in the same half with two goals. The Red Devils went down to ten men when Paul Scholes was ejected after two yellow cards in the 59th minute. This was Spurs chance to reassert themselves and take control of the game, except nothing of the sort happened. Wayne Rooney managed to create an excellent, and rather Rooney-esque goal to make the match 3-1 in the 78th minute, and Tottenham was cowed for the rest of the game.

The other big match was Man City versus Arsenal with that oh-so-typical jilted #1 striker looking for validation, revenge, or whatever other dumb thing you want to concoct for the sake of an interesting story. Emmanuel Adebayor managed to score a goal against his old club after a fractious summer full of barbs back and forth. What relatively big name striker can’t go to a different club these days without a he-said-I-said fackfest? So stupid. Well, somebody got stomped and the FA is talking about bans and everything.

Personally, I don’t really feel compelled to weigh in on this sort of thing. Stomping is bad. Diving is bad. Murder is worse. Man City won the game handily. I have no idea if they are on the ascendancy or not. It’s early in the season and I find fatalistic prognostications don’t really help anybody.

Grand assessment of two interesting matches in the EPL: Man U beat Spurs, Man City beat Arsenal.