In the lead-up to this Premier League opener, Sky Sports had been trailing the fact it will show a total of 1,500 live games this season. Lay these end-to-end and that adds up to about 3,000 hours, or 125 whole days doing nothing but watching football. Chuck in the endless over-gorge of clips, highlights, noises off, VAR rage, furious punditry shemozzles, and that’s pretty much the next eight months spent slumped in your memory foam chair, cramming in those great dripping handfuls of sweet, sweet football-derived product.
For Arsenal’s supporters, on this evidence at least, it might just be a slightly easier experience this time around. They say retaining a title is never easy. Well winning it wasn’t exactly painless either.
But how do you manage that altered gravity? On the one hand there’s the Roy Keane approach, performative hunger, serial victory as an act of self-harm. Win the league, stab yourself in the leg, and win it again.
Does hunger matter so much with the game so mechanised, a matter of patterns, systems, processed movements? For Arsenal it is more a case of finding other rhythms and deeper gears. Even before this straightforward 3-0 defeat of Coventry, the goal was clear enough.
Win the league, but win it better. Make these games less interesting, or at least less painful. Well, stage one complete.
Two things happened here. First, Arsenal won this game as comfortably as any in the last two seasons. This was like watching a team in demo mode, just trying out the new software, revving the throttle in neutral.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
