Pre-season feel to games predictable

MAYBE it’s just us, but there was something a little underwhelming about the whole thing, and that’s even before we get to the empty stands, canned crowd sounds and over-the-top bombast from the broadcasters.

Despite all the build up and, frankly, the widespread yearning for its return, the first week of Premier League action was decidedly pedestrian. There was very little of that usual snap and zip you come to expect from football at this level. Nowhere was this more in evidence than in Sunday’s Liverpool derby.

It didn’t feel very much like a derby at all. Liverpool were flat. Everton too, although marginally less so with Seamus Coleman putting in a top-notch performance to mark Sadio Mané out of the game. One might be inclined to attribute the relative poverty of the game to the fact nobody was in attendance, that there was none of that usual crackling atmosphere when the neighbours from across Stanley Park meet, but we think the answer is a bit more prosaic than that – as romantic a notion as it is.

It’s very simply the fact that none of these teams are any where near match sharp having been out of action for three months. That’s longer than most summer breaks and, even then, every two years out of four there’s an international tournament in the summer months.

A three month break coupled with a very limited pre-season – Liverpool played one game against fellow Lancashire side Blackburn Rovers, which they won six-nil – meant that we were always likely to end up with a fairly choppy resumption of hostilities across the playing fields of old Blighty.

The good news is that as the weeks go by we’re likely to see the quality of games increase quite considerably. It wasn’t until the second round of games in the Bundesliga, for instance, that FC Bayern and Dortmund played out probably the best game of the socially distant era.

We don’t have that long to wait until there’s a game of that magnitude in the Premier League either with Liverpool travelling the Ethiad to face Manchester City on Thursday of next week. With each side having a handful of games under their belts by then we should hopefully get the type of game we’ve been missing all these months.

Not a huge amount is going to be on the line in Manchester – Liverpool are going to win the title regardless of what happens – but pride (on both sides) should be enough to give us what we’ve been waiting for.