Post by Macmoish on Aug 21, 2010 7:50:40 GMT
QPR under Briatore and Paladini would so have belonged!
The great David Lacey/The Guardian
Premier League at hysteria pitch
David Lacey: Top-flight English football is more overblown than Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth
Mad world of the Premier League
– where even Big Brother seems saneAs Blackpool have discovered, top-flight football is more overblown than Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth ever was
Ian Holloway has discovered that values can quicky become distorted in the super-heated Premier League. Photograph: Alex Livesey/Getty Images
Ian Holloway has quickly concluded that the Premier League is not all there. After his newly-promoted Blackpool team had won 4-0 at Wigan he interrupted the ensuing fuss to declare that "it's the maddest world I've ever known", adding that he did not understand why everything had suddenly become so important. "It's like being in Big Brother. It's absolutely ridiculous."
Clearly it is not the Premier League Holloway experienced as a midfielder with Queens Park Rangers in the 90s. Then, people just got a bit worked up from time to time. Now football conducts its business, on and off the field, in an atmosphere of constant hysteria compared to which a day in the Big Brother house is about as fraught as an average Sunday at the vicarage.
Blackpool have soon caught the mood. Already the club's chairman, Karl Oyston, has resigned having previously condemned the activities of some agents as he tried to sign players to strengthen the squad. "I expected the landscape to be a lot different and the way that people behaved to be a lot different," he said. No Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas any more.
As to mad worlds, the Premier League does seem determined to exist on another planet. How sane is it, for example, that one of the reasons for writing off Blackpool's chances of staying up, apart from the fact that they will not be playing Wigan every Saturday, is their insistence that none of their players will be paid more than £10,000 a week. Makes sense. No point in bankrupting the club in a probably vain attempt to buy safety. Only in the Premier League would this be regarded as a pauper's wage, which says more about the league than it does about Blackpool.
And still the foreign tycoons march on into English football's hinterland. Ahsan Ali Syed, a Bahrain-based Indian billionaire, is willing to pay £300m for Blackburn (the football club, not the town) and is already talking about another Real Madrid at Ewood Park. If everyone who has wanted to recreate Real in England actually did so the Premier League would now be up to its eyes in all-white lookalikes, but somehow it never seems to happen.
Blackburn supporters would probably settle for revisiting the Rovers of the mid-90s. Syed is ready to give Sam Allardyce £100m to spend, which might send a tremor of anticipation through Africa but would hardly be enough to buy any reincarnations of Alan Shearer, Chris Sutton or Colin Hendry who had not already been signed by Manchester City.
Sir Alex Ferguson did not mention City this week when he talked about the "kamikaze" spending of some Premier League clubs and only time will decide whether or not they fit the bill.
Should City score a few hits on the flight deck of Old Trafford's ambitions they will be able to boast of squillions well spent. The value for money of a transfer fee, great or small, can only be judged in retrospect.
The £3.5m Fergie paid Nantes for Eric Djemba-Djemba in the summer of 2003 seems trifling now but appeared an extravagance then once the Cameroon midfielder showed what he could, or rather couldn't, do.
Ferguson has raised a few eyebrows, critical eyebrows, by admitting that he had signed a young Portuguese striker, Bébé, from Vitória Guimarães for £7.4m without having seen him play. What could the Manchester United manager be thinking of? Actually he was trusting his scouting system, much as Bill Shankly kept faith with his Liverpool spies when he bought a 20-year-old midfielder from Sc**thorpe in 1971, sight unseen. Some bloke called Kevin Keegan.
Holloway wonders why every triviality has become so important. Part of it is due to the Premier League's success in selling itself, helped by Sky's big drum. Nothing wrong with that. Phineas T Barnum did not get where he was by placing small ads in the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the same time it is hard to avoid the feeling that football really isstarting to share Shankly's belief that it is more important a matter than life or death.
Blackpool could do worse than remind the game of a time 71 years ago when they led the league after winning their opening three matches, against Huddersfield, Brentford and Wolves. Sheffield United and Arsenal were a point behind, Liverpool one further back. An intriguing season lay ahead. Then Hitler invaded Poland.
www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/aug/21/mad-world-premier-league
