MAN CITY VS WEST HAM
Sunday 19th May, 4:00pm
City @ 1/10
West Ham @ 20/1
Draw @ 10/1
view odds
We have finally reached the last few pages of the epic novel that was the 2023/24 football season.
Along the way we have laughed, we have cried, and we have thrown the whole damn book in the bin in galvanic frustration – usually when VAR has disallowed a great goal, or when a team has conceded when trying to play out from the back…or when certain commentators engage in a battle to make the dullest comments ever recorded on live television.
But there has been more than enough intrigue, controversy, and, of course, thrilling football to keep us all ploughing speedily through the chapters.
Just this week the fixture list helped to engender a fascinating and slightly bizarre piece of plotting; a situation so knotty that even the world’s greatest novelists – Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Nadine Dorries – would have doffed their literary caps in respect of its delicate construction.
In one corner we had ‘The Pride’ of Tottenham Hotspur – represented by Ange Postecoglou and his team – playing a tough football match where a positive outcome would increase their chances of enjoying elite European football next season.
Along the way we have laughed, we have cried, and we have thrown the whole damn book in the bin in galvanic frustration.
And in the other we had ‘The Prejudice’ – a significant minority of Spurs fans, who would rather their team lost than strive towards any outcome that might inadvertently help their bitter local rivals, Arsenal, achieve success.
While outsiders may talk of the latter as being a prime example of ‘small club mentality’, I prefer to see it as a major reason the Premier League is so popular. Fans have invested much of their lives and incomes into supporting their teams; accordingly, they can react however they like (within the law) to what they see on the pitch.
These are feelings that have gestated for decades; they are not the product of 30-second hype video. They are organic, hard-to-predict responses; and, boy, do we need those.
Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that a football team in possession of an outrageous fortune will eventually win the Premier League title. And now, Manchester City, predictably, are about to win it for an unprecedented fourth time in a row.
The fact that they haven’t won it already; the fact that another title race is set to go to the wire should be cause for collective, nationwide delirium. Football fans should be frothing at the mouth in anticipation of the most Super of Sundays. It ought to be a festival-type occasion – a bit like Eurovision; only with more histrionic screeching and sweaty, acrobatic flailing.
Football fans should be frothing at the mouth in anticipation of the most Super of Sundays.
Instead, it is like waiting to open your presents on Christmas morning; but, seeing as your present is shaped exactly like a guitar…you know you’re going to be getting a guitar. The excitement is diminished; almost non-existent.
Manchester City v West Ham United is a 4pm kick-off on Sunday. And Arsenal host Everton at the same time.
But what if the guitar beneath the festive wrapping is not just any old guitar? What if it is the very same guitar that Slash played outside the chapel in the November Rain video? What if the writers of this Premier League season have also saved one last, very unexpected twist for the final paragraph?
Can a West Ham side playing their last game under David Moyes – a team who aren’t just ‘on the beach’, they have moved-in and have taken out a mortgage on their very own sandcastle – somehow summon up the pride and desire to give Manchester City an almighty fright this weekend?
Or are we better off seeking emotionally-engaging entertainment in the form of the various farewells that will be taking place on Sunday afternoon? Including a man who tried so hard to prevent the hegemony – the predictability – that he has had to take early retirement: auf wiedersehen, Jürgen Klopp!
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