Forget the factors.. let’s just enjoy glorious goal gluts like it was 1963!
WE don’t need statisticians to point out that recent scorelines belong to a black-and-white era of Brylcreemed heads and dubbined boots.
In modern times, champions like Liverpool don’t get stuffed 7-2 by a team that scraped to safety two months earlier.
Manchester United don’t lose 6-1 at home to a team that used to provide Sir Alex Ferguson with the simple team-talk of, “Lads, it’s Tottenham.”
Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City don’t get beaten 5-2 at home by a team that gets tonked 3- 0 on their own ground seven days later by West Ham.
This is a scale of insane, formbook-torching, net-bursting gluttony not seen since Boxing Day 1963 when there were 66 goals scored in 10 top-flight games, including Fulham beating recent champs Ipswich 10-1, Blackburn thumping Bobby Moore’s West Ham 8- 2, Burnley smashing the League’s eventual runners-up Manchester United 6-1, Liverpool hammering Stoke by the same scoreline, and Blackpool going down 5-1 at home to Chelsea.
At least in 1963 there was a fathomable reason for the freak scorelines: In that pre-nutritionist, badlypaid era, most players weren’t heeding the festive advice to take it easy over Christmas dinner.
Today the reasons offered for the freakery are as freeflowing as the goals: The absence of fans removes attackers’ inhibitions and makes defenders complacent, a truncated pre-season has left players short of fitness, the concentration of games since lockdown has led to
“cognitive fatigue,” high defensive lines are being sussed, and VAR mixed with the ridiculous hand-ball rule has led to too many penalties.
But instead of wasting time working out if any of those f factors are responsible for this rogue behaviour, why not embrace the joy it’s bringing when stadiums are soulless bowls and fans sit at home making do with a gruel- like version of their dearest passion?
We’re only four games in, but seeing Everton, Aston Villa and Leicester in the top three feels like discovering a 1962 Football Pink newspaper in your loft.
Knowing that Marcelo Bielsa’s breathtaking Leeds side would probably be in that top four too, had they not drawn with Manchester City and narrowly lost to Liverpool, takes you back to 1964 when Don Revie’s promoted side took the top flight by storm, losing the title only on goal difference.
This is a welcome sight not just for the success-starved hordes who follow these hugely-popular clubs but for those of us who have refused to believe that English football was born on the first Sky Super Sunday of the Premier League era in 1992.
Ask a fan under 30 what Everton and Aston Villa have in common and they’d probably answer that they are sponsored by Cazoo and neither has lifted a trophy since they started school in the mid-90s.
If the top of that table allows columns like this to remind younger generations that there are huge, historic clubs outside the current Big Six, that’s no mean thing.
So here goes: When the
Premier League began, Manchester United had won seven First Division titles and one European Cup, which was exactly the same as Aston Villa had done.
Everton had been English champions nine times and Leeds had won three titles and narrowly lost a European Cup final.
It’s very likely that normal service will resume and these sides may fall off the pace but for now it is uplifting to see fans of clubs in three of the four biggest cities outside London bursting with pride again and dreaming of a return to the top of English football.
And it is also feasible that one or two of them may stay the pace and give us a proper old-fashioned title race with half a dozen clubs still in with a shout at Easter.
So let’s drop the inquests and the excuses for this glorious goal glut, enjoy it while it lasts, and party like it’s 1963.
It’s uplifting to see fans of clubs in three of the four biggest cities outside London bursting with pride again