At last! We are now officially in the same month as the start of the new Premier League season.
It may have seemed like a long time coming but, in fact, it has only been three months during which time some clubs have spent a fortune, others not so much and some nothing at all.
Friendly games have been played around the globe to ensure that the wider audience got to see their heroes, warts and all, by attending games in places as diverse as Tanzania, America, China and Norway.
Kenedy, a Chelsea player for those of you unaware of the fact, even managed to generate lots of emotion despite not being one of his teams superstars. Unfortunately, it was the type of emotion that has certainly cost Chelsea a few thousand fans, it cost him his place in the squad and, no doubt, a fair amount of money in the shape of a fine and it may well cost him even more when his future is discussed by the bigwigs at Stamford Bridge.
United and City proved, yet again, that money is no object when it comes to buying players. What, apparently, is an object, particularly for Dithering Ed Woodward at United, is other clubs refusing to sell their player. Ed has yet to solve this conundrum and hasn’t worked out that the simple answer is to do what Chelsea and City do, which is to pay the selling club the fee they are asking.*
So the teams are nearly all back in Blighty and raring to start the new season in two weeks. Well, apart from United who, having already played six friendlies, have to play another against Sampdoria before travelling to Macedonia for the Supercup against Real Madrid.
Oh, and apart from Chelsea and Arsenal, whose season actually starts next week in that friendly of all friendlies, the Community Shield.
Arsenal limbered up for their game against Chelsea by winning their own mini-tournament. Quite how they managed this is beyond the comprehension of mere mortals as they managed to lose their last game to a team who boasted a 100% record throughout. Maybe the fact that Arsenal were the hosts had something to do with it. After all, it was THEIR ball and THEIR goalposts and even THEIR pitch, so we have to assume that it is THEIR trophy and they’re not giving it away, not even to a team who won every game and actually deserve it!
Over in Scouseland all is quiet. Liverpool are tiptoeing around and not even whispering the name of Virgil van Dijk, just in case Southampton have a spy in the camp waiting to report any mention of their wantaway centre back.
Barcelona seem to think they can get Philippe Courinho to join them at the Camp Nou, (and so does everybody else including, one suspects, Jürgen Klopp). That is a deal just waiting to happen!
Meanwhile, Everton are trying to offload Ross Barkley to anybody prepared to take him and, at present, it seems likely that it will be Tottenham who are going to disappoint all the non-Tottenham fans and actually buy a player! Mind you, Dastardy Daniel Levy hasn’t yet agreed to anything, now there’s a surprise. It seems that, when doing business with Spurs, clubs have to get the OK from DD irrespective of whether they are buying or selling!
Everton also wish to continue partaking of the soap opera that is their attempts to sign Gylfi Sigurdsson. If they stump up £50 million we can almost certainly guarantee that they will get their man.
In other news, Sky Sports have increased their “Transfer Centres” to four per day until the end of August. This despite the fact they were already having to repeat absolute dross such as showing a goal from every player who has played for José Mourinho at two clubs just because he is going to sign Nemanja Matic again.
When will they learn that people are not interested in watching the same reports, which cannot even be classified as news, twice per day, never mind four times per day?
Yes, we accept that people arrive home at different times and, for them, it is good that they can catch up on anything they may have missed but the clue here is in the words “catch” and “up“. Sky have a catch-up facility in order to watch missed programmes so there is no need for a live news channel to continuously show the same time-wasting rubbish over and over again.
And that’s it! We do not want to become like Sky and start repeating ourselves and so will leave it there until the next time.
*It would appear that, for the time being at least, the penny has finally dropped with Dithering Ed. Since this article was written he has signed Nemanja Matic from Chelsea using that trusty old merhod of paying the selling club the amount they are asking for!
WHY SAY ANYTHING? 