The past 17 days up to and including Sunday’s cut-off gave us 30 Premier League games and 79 goals. Which, if you take Spurs out of it – and this is fair because Spurs are now post‑goal, an entertainment concept unrelated to goals or even football itself – is really quite a lot. Are your pathways stimulated?
Are the neural connectors flickering? Well get ready for cold turkey, for 19 blank days of shivers and shakes until the Premier League show resumes in October. Maybe it really is time to buy one of those powders off the internet.
The international break will provide its own intrigue. There will be discussions about whether Thomas Tuchel is or isn’t responsible for the inherited cultural weaknesses of English football. There will be rage at Tuchel’s inability to coach the players to keep the ball as never before via his few short hours on the training pitch.
And yet more rage at the real issues, basically the fact he continues to be German and looks like a scurvy-ridden Napoleonic naval commander powered solely by ship’s biscuits and morphine. This is unlikely to fill the hole. There will be an unavoidable “contrast effect”, the rush of adrenaline that only serves to deepen the low when it is gone.
But there are also some familiar autumn rituals to help us through. One of these is the state‑of‑the‑nation Premier League address, pegged out around key questions such as “where are we?”, “what are we?” and “where is it all going?”. This time around these are relatively easy to answer.
Five rounds into the Premier League season this is pretty much a cut-and-paste job. The big news: there is no big news. Events continue to happen at great volume.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
