In For The Hat Trick

The men who run English football insist that the Premier League is the biggest, best, most exciting league in the world. No single event has done more to reinforce that opinion than the final weekend of last season, when, down 2-1 with only three minutes to go, Manchester City scored two late goals and secured its first league championship. The match was thrilling for all the usual reasons: the crowd went wild, the goal-scorer removed his shirt, and Sky broadcast footage of the despondent second-place team looking despondent.

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Since I last posted, an Era Has Ended, Borussia Dortmund has reached the Champions League final and, according to a report I read five minutes ago, FC Sion has sacked Gennaro Gattuso. Meanwhile, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time writing about Jane Austen, the nineteenth-century novelist who I’m 99 percent sure moonlighted as a professional footballer.

Anyway, here’s what you can expect from INFTH over the next couple of weeks:

• A piece about FOX Sports commentator Gus Johnson
• The last installment in my fantasy football series
• General musings on the end of the season

I’m going to leave you with a quotation from Pride and Prejudice, which Austen started writing during half-time of a Southampton match. In honor of Mark van Bommel:

“Angry people are not always wise.”

There’s a new INFTH piece in the works. But in the meantime, this should keep you going:

David Yaffe-Bellany’s fantasy football coverage:

• Adventures in the Fantasy Premier League, Gameweek 32
• And Gameweek 31

And Fernando Torres looking like a total wally.

It’s raining, and Andres Villas-Boas is getting wet. He’s squatting, but rain is trickling down the arc of his back, and
supporters in the stands are mocking the whole pathetic spectacle. He’s wearing a heavy, Wenger-like coat, but it doesn’t matter, because dampness is definitely in this guy’s future – you can just tell.

Watching AVB try to turn stodgy, defensive Chelsea into a genuinely entertaining football team was sad in a way that could’ve been kind of funny – but wasn’t. And it always seemed to be raining.

When Villas-Boas signed for Chelsea, he was young, energetic, and so enthusiastic about 4-3-3 that he made the whole notion of an attacking trident seem way more exciting than it was ever going to be. AVB’s treble-winning season at Porto marked the peak of football’s obsession with the Mourinho-esque Euro-snob manager: as Grantland’s Brian Phillips put it, you couldn’t “mow a field in the Iberian Peninsula without finding six or seven sharply dressed and tactically savvy managers under toadstools and rocks.”

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