Who were the EPL best 11 in 2017?
Funny you should ask. My lads will be playing 4-4-2 and we shall be employing a diamond shape in midfield. Here goes nothing:
Goalkeeper: Hugo Lloris, Spurs
Lloris was the best goalkeeper in the EPL in the 2016-17 season and part of the Spurs back-line that only conceded 24 goals. Cool, calm and collected and a decent distributor with his feet.
Back Four
Victor Moses, Chelsea
The most improved player in the EPL, bar none. I defy anyone (except Antonio Conte) to say they saw his level of consistency and defensive nous reach the heady heights it has all season long.
Toby Alderweireld, Spurs
Big, strong, covers ground quickly and another brick in that Spurs defensive wall. A man mountain at the back and a defender who actually knows how to defend: something of a novelty in the modern game.
Michael Keane, Burnley
A player who has not let his release by Manchester United phase him. Keane has used it to his advantage and has channeled all his energies into becoming a first-class player and defender.
Danny Rose, Spurs
Didn’t play masses of games this season, but I love his energy up and down the flanks and his desire to improve the defensive side of the game. Completes a trio of Spurs players in my back line and for good reason.
Midfielders
Victor Wanyama, Spurs
A holding midfield player of top quality. Loved him at Celtic, saw him grow at Southampton, and now he is part of a top-two side in the EPL. Covers ground, never loses a tackle and can chip in with the odd goal.
N’Golo Kante, Chelsea
What can we say about this guy. An engine of a Ferrari in the body of a Mini. This boy covers ground like no other and has just won his second EPL title with two clubs in as many years. On top of that, Joey Barton doesn’t rate him: Kante has everything going for him.
Dele Alli, Spurs
Another Spurs player to add to the list: just to cheer up the Arsenal fans reading this. Young, English, and by all accounts pretty level-headed. 17 goals and five assists in a wonderful season for this young man, and I honestly think there is more in the locker to come.
Eden Hazard, Chelsea
The archetypal tip of the diamond player. Hazard plays with such grace and youthful exuberance now he has managed to free himself of the shackles of Jose Mourinho. 15 goals and five assists and the love of the game back. A player who glides past opponents like no other and improving all the time.
Forwards
Sadio Mane, Liverpool
Look, it’s my ball, my back garden and I’m picking the team. I had to get a Liverpool player in there somehow. 13 goals and five assists in only 27 EPL appearances shows you what a threat this guy is. A huge miss to Liverpool when injured.
Harry Kane, Spurs
Bloody hell, another Spurs player! 22 goals and six assists in a season that saw Kane continue his growth. Love this kid and his attitude. Long may his rich vein of scoring continue for club and country.
Imps, Devils, & Filthy Lucre in The FA Cup
Premier League teams are typically scorned and made out to be the pantomime villains of the FA Cup when they field vastly weakened teams, while Non-league clubs are considered the Cinderellas of the FA Cup fairy tales.
Sutton United turned this thesis on its head – but more about them later. Luckily, we have Lincoln City to talk about first, and to fly the flag proudly for the National League’s participation in the FA Cup. The upstarts from Lincoln had the audacity to stroll into Burnley of the EPL and turn them over on their own Turf Moor. They enjoyed the added kudos of making Joey Barton a laughing stock with his embarrassing histrionics (cheating!).
I’ve been lucky enough to come into contact with Imps boss Danny Cowley in my non-league playing days when he was manager of Concord Rangers. I’ve seen him go from strength to strength as a manager. Cowley is amiable, affable, football smart, and above all else a hard grafter. In fact, he reminds me very much of Burnley’s Sean Dyche, another first-class human being – and amazingly humble with it.
Cowley left Concord on an upward trajectory and continued to further his reputation at Braintree Town before leaving for Lincoln City. Lincoln currently sit top of the National League with promotion back to the Football League very much in sight. With the forthcoming FA Cup quarter-final against Arsenal, he has one hell of a season in the offing.
And do you know what really made me sit up and take notice? Not the victory against Burnley, but the 1-0 away win at North Ferriby a few days later in their bread and butter scrap in the National League. I’m not ashamed to say that I swooned when I heard goalscoring hero Sean Raggett state after the Burnley match that there was no time to party because they had to prepare for North Ferriby away on Tuesday.
That tells me a couple of things. Firstly, these players have their feet firmly on the ground and secondly, Cowley has his squad singing from the same hymn sheet: yes, the FA Cup run is getting the headlines, but it all means nothing to the playing and coaching staff unless they get promoted. Notice I didn’t mention the chairman, as he was without a doubt giggling into his bubbly and bank statement in the bar after the Burnley heroics.
Sutton have won many fans and plaudits during their phenomenal FA Cup run that culminated in them drawing Arsenal at home in the last 16, and rightly so. But how did they reward us, the neutral observers, willing them with all our hearts to cause the biggest upset in FA Cup history? They lifted off the lid of the trophy and pissed in it; well, at least it felt that way.
The football match was turned into a sideshow by Sutton’s reserve goalkeeper Wayne Shaw. Shaw found out that bookies were offering 8-1 on him tucking into a snack during the game, so he made sure he did. (I’ll wager he lumped on it and I bet a few of his mates did, too).
I was appalled and disgusted. The media regularly batter EPL and Championship teams that disrespect the FA Cup, and here they were basically colluding with Sutton to do exactly that. As the rotund substitute tucked into a pie on the sideline, it was blatantly obvious that this was 100% contrived. Self-respect died that moment, and all for a few quid. Andy Warhol must have turned in his grave, because that surely wasn’t what he was insinuating when he said that everyone would get their 15 minutes of fame.
As it turns out, the stunt was not just contrived, but it also probably went against the betting rules in football. Perpetrator Wayne Shaw is not only a member of the squad, but also the playing staff. He even proved stupid enough to implicate his teammates, it seems. On a morning TV show (sacrilege in itself), he blabbed, “We’re not allowed to bet, but a few of the lads laid on.”
Cue the usual riposte that it was just a harmless bit of banter. Not surprisingly, Richard Watson, Gambling Commission’s Enforcement and Intelligence Director, didn’t concur; “Integrity in sport is not a joke, and we have opened an investigation to establish exactly what happened.”
Look, this isn’t some hatchet job, and I certainly pitied the fact that Shaw subsequently lost his job, but I honestly just hate it when people lose sight of the real reason they are in such privileged positions. Shaw had the wonderful opportunity to face off against Arsenal because of Sutton United’s amazing success on the football pitch. Why suddenly turn the wondrous occasion into a reality TV show?
The sad thing is that no one is even talking about the FA Cup tie that truly should have cemented Sutton United, once again, into the annals of history. Coventry City, anyone? Let’s just leave it there and leave Sutton in our rear-view. C’mon, Lincoln, give us another day to remember, and for the right reasons, please.
What's gone wrong with the FA Cup?
The FA Cup, I fear, has gone the way of the Monty Python parrot. There are numerous examples of teams treating this majestic competition with disdain, but let’s just focus on 2017. As I sit here at the keyboard, the fourth round replay between Leicester City and Derby County is flickering away in the background. Leicester have made 10 changes from their weekend league fixture and Derby County have made eight.
I consider this an absolute liberty, and if either of these two highly experienced managers (Steve McClaren and Claudio Ranieri) have the audacity to insinuate anything other than that they are treating this match with contempt, then they are trying to imply we are all fools….and, yes, most of us do remember your Dutch accent Schteve, so don’t try it on with us.
I do have a touch of sympathy with the two managers who both have other, more pressing concerns. Ranieri needs to keep EPL football at Leicester City for the 2017/18 season (not forgetting Champions League games looming on the horizon) and McClaren is desperate to get Derby County promoted into the EPL (they currently sit three points off the play-offs). The money at stake in the EPL far outweighs any glory that raising the FA Cup trophy at Wembley in May will bring; shame that this may be.
Liverpool are another team with a fine history in the FA Cup who are now treating the competition with little more than a shrug of the shoulders. They barely scraped by Plymouth Argyle in the third round and then suffered the ignominy of losing at Anfield to Wolverhampton Wanderers in the fourth….Wolves being an exceptionally mediocre Championship team at best.
My old team, Millwall, knocked out EPL opposition in both the third and fourth rounds. They first beat Bournemouth and then Watford with an aggregate score of 4-0 and showed that League One teams are more than a match for lower Premier League reserve sides: something that has been proven time and time again.
So why do managers care less? Simply, because there is no incentive to take the FA Cup any more seriously. More importantly, there is no punishment for fielding these ridiculously weakened teams.We all know that the solution is for the FA to stop pandering, as always, to the bigger clubs demands and take some forthright action. All clubs should be forced to play at least 50% of the outfield players that started the previous league fixture. This still gives every team the opportunity to change up their goalkeeper and up to five outfield players: clear, simple, effective and a fair balance for everybody involved.
Unless we do this, or come up with a similar solution, then, just like John Cleese’ stiff Norwegian Blue, it’s RIP FA Cup. “The plumage don’t enter into it; it’s stone dead.”
Has Gary Neville finally lost his marbles?
Being a Liverpool fan I should really hate Gary Neville. Whisper it, but as a player I really quite respected him: a player with a lot less ability than many of his peers, but a man with a will and desire that was second to none. A player who won medal after medal and earned millions, but the passion to win didn’t diminish one iota. Boy could the England team do with a few Gary Neville’s right now.
Now, as a pundit, Gary Neville is up there with the best of them. Granted the bar is low at the moment, but at least in Frank Lampard he may finally have some competition, and the worldwide audience may have a sidekick who doesn’t require subtitles.
Like us all though, Gary gets it wrong sometimes. And earlier in the week he had me spraying my Cheerios all across the kitchen. I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes as I scanned the football news over breakfast. The great Gary Neville appeared to have lost his marbles, along with his memory, on the subject of managerial sackings:
“I would support completely the idea that managers can’t be sacked during the season.”
Pardon, Gary? run that one past me again! You expect me to get behind a rule that allows a manager to run a team into the ground and into the relegation zone and expect the owner to sit idly by while his investment goes up….I mean down in smoke? Because that’s what it is, right? an investment: most owners do actually want to make money.
And what about the poor fans who are forced to watch such turgid rubbish week after week? Do they not get any say in this? You know as well as I do Gary that it’s the fans, more often than not, who influence the owners to pull the metaphorical trigger.
Football fans love to give you the ‘we’ll turn up whatever the weather and however the team is performing,’ but that’s only the hardcore fans. Most clubs tend to thrive off the fair weather fan, and nowadays the tourist fan. I played at Crystal Palace in 2010 when 15,000 used to turn up to our Championship games and I’ll bet you any money that 98% of the crowd came from about three counties surrounding Selhurst Park.
I went back to watch a game just a few weeks ago and the lure of the EPL brought well over 25,000 to the match including numerous fans from all over the world. That is to Palace: imagine the diversity of the crowd at Old Trafford, Anfield, or Stamford Bridge.
A large percentage of these fans turn up expecting a modicum of success. When they pay their money they have the right to think that the owner can hire and fire at will to give their club the best chance of that success. Sometimes survival in their division is all they ask for.
I don’t know, maybe Neville is still a little bit peeved at how quickly he was removed from Valencia after his unsurprisingly disastrous spell. I’m sure the Valencia players and fans are more than cock-a-hoop that this idiotic notion is only that: an idiotic notion. And anyone who has the gall to argue that you can’t sack the players if they are doing a bad job can step outside and self-combust. You can drop the players, you fools.
How about every team has to start with eleven players and however badly they are playing you have to stick with them? Only an injury means you can bring in somebody else from the playing staff: an equally ludicrous suggestion and one that even Gary wouldn’t get behind.
Neville took out his spade and dug a little deeper: “Football would support it, in terms of the professional side – I’m not sure whether the owners would.” I know that Neville has a decent fan-base at Sky Sports, but now he is the voice of football? He knows exactly what “football” is thinking and knows they would support his theory? I’m really struggling to believe this for more than about a nanosecond.
I played at clubs where the manager would have destroyed the team and the club if they hadn’t been removed. Managers who had gained such little trust and respect from the players, that it was evident that a majority of them were performing well below peak. This wasn’t the players want, it was just that they had no idea what the manager wanted from them: there were more grey areas than an English skyline.
Let’s not forget that sometimes owners just make the wrong appointments. Sometimes these owners know this within a matter of weeks and it is up to them to clear up their own mess: not just for their own good, but the good of the club and the good of the fans.
A manager who can’t be sacked can sit in a little bubble for twelve months knowing he is untouchable. I agree that most managers wouldn’t think like this, but the same as every profession, there are some bad ‘uns out there.
I believe the final summing up of this argument should focus on Gary Neville himself. For those of you who don’t know, Neville and four other multi-millionaire, ex-Man Utd teammates own a 50% stake in their own football team/vanity project. The team is Salford City (slightly ironic) of the sixth tier of English football. The other 50% is owned by billionaire Peter Lim who also owns the majority stake in the afore-mentioned Valencia CF. (I know, you couldn’t make this shit up, sometimes). So, Gary and his chums, a few months into their reign, decided to sack the manager. The timing, I hear you ask? Oh, it was mid-season.
No more questions, your Honour.
A nod to the Art of Defending
The art of defending is alive and kicking and currently hunkered down in Turin. In this column, I usually throw my jingoistic hat into the ring and talk all things EPL – but not today; not after witnessing the defensive master class that Juventus performed at Camp Nou earlier in the week.
Yes, they are aging, yes their squad is currently wafer thin, but we all saw the stunning comeback that Barca produced mere weeks ago against PSG. While many expected Juventus to hold out and win, no one thought they would pull down Barca’s shorts in their own backyard and gave them a thorough spanking.
I think every spectator the world over expected more spark and less whimper from the hosts, but Juve shackled every single Barca player: not one was allowed to have even an above average performance. As the game drew to a close and the “ole, ole’s” began ringing around Camp Nou from the away end you knew that you were witnessing something special from Juve, and the end of an era from Barca’s point of view.
The defensive performance from Juve had sucked the life out of Barca, allowing Juve to keep the ball for large swathes of time as the clock ticked ever closer to the 90 minutes mark. They huffed and they puffed, but Barca couldn’t blow down Juve’s wall. You turn on many football games around the world nowadays and it’s as if defending is just a thing of the past; a figment of the imagination.
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When John Stones was bought for 50 million quid and touted as the best young defender in England I sat up and took notice. It didn’t take too long to realise that however comfortable he may be on the ball, he can’t actually defend: not properly, not to the level required to win Champions League trophies, or tournaments with his country.
I sincerely hope that players of his ilk sat down with a pen and paper and thoroughly studied the Juventus backline.
Let’s be honest here, the majority of the Juventus back five should be drawing their football pension. Buffon is 39 and looking as sprightly as ever; Bonucci turns 30 in a few days; Chiellini is 32; Dani Alves is 34 in a fortnight and that leaves Alex Sandro a virtual foetus at left-back at 26 years of age.
Although Monaco buck the trend of youngsters coming to the fore in the Champions League, you sometimes can’t beat a bit of experience. Along with that experience, their strong desire to defend and protect their goal at all costs seeps from every pore of the Juve back line. They were able to pinch incredibly narrow against a Barca side lacking any adept width. Add to the fact that the whole Juventus side works for each other and at times you had a back six with Cuadrado and Mandzukic often filling in as full-backs allowing Juve to play with four centre-backs.
Additionally, Pjanic and Khedira screened the back four/six in exemplary fashion and Barca simply had no space to attack. I hate statistics with a passion, and not just because I’m not very good at mathematics, but Barca had 19 attempts on goal and only one hit the target….no wonder Buffon pulled on his flat cap and lounged on his deckchair for large portions of the game: no post match shower required.
For all their possession (65% if you must know) Barca had literally nothing to show for it. As the game progressed Messi, Neymar and Suarez became more and more frustrated, with the latter frequently left to flap around on the floor at every Juve touch. Luis Enrique said before the game that Barcelona aimed to score five against the mighty Italians. He had every right to have more than a modicum of confidence with a 100% record in the Champions League at home (15 out of 15). Unfortunately for him, his confident words came back to haunt him as Barca couldn’t even muster five shots to sting the hands of Gigi Buffon.
The writing was already on the wall for Barca with the prior record of Juventus’ desire for clean sheets in the Champions League: Juventus hadn’t conceded a single goal from open play going into the Barca match and still haven’t (a stunning 900 minutes). Allay this with the eight out of 10 clean sheets in the Champions League this season and surely Juve are the team to beat in Cardiff this May.
Enough of my pontificating about the mighty Juventus and let me turn very briefly to my day job working for Sporting Kansas City of MLS fame.
Whilst we are on the topic of defending, let me tip my cap towards the SKC backline, who themselves have only conceded two goals in six games this season: both of those coming in additional time and proving nothing more than consolation goals for San Jose Earthquakes and Colorado Rapids respectively.
Now, I am making no comparisons between the two teams as a whole, but I’m definitely comparing the defensive strengths of both Juventus and SKC. The similarities are blatantly apparent: both teams defend from the front. Dom Dwyer for SKC works tirelessly up front to prevent any quality service from opposition backlines.
The ethos of both sides is to grind down the opposition before letting the skills of the attacking players come to the fore and prove decisive. SKC have kept four clean sheets from six games so far and move towards a top of the table clash this weekend with FC Dallas. FCD themselves have a formidable defense, having conceded only three goals this season.
What I really like above all else is that four American centre-backs who all know how to defend will be on show: Opara and Besler (right) for SKC and Zimmerman and Hedges for FCD. A couple of the guys in control of USMNT positions and a couple fighting tooth and nail for spots in the squad. The future certainly looks bright in that position, before we even look at the European based American defenders.
Cast a glance towards the game if you are lucky enough to get the chance.
I guess, in conclusion, I’m saying that defending still matters. Give me a lion-hearted John Terry over a ball-playing, non-defending John Stones any day of the week.