It’s a new ball game... but some things never change

This is not football as we know it but it is football all the same and we should still be grateful for that. We knew it would not be perfect. We knew it would look and feel strange.

it seems, too, that some clubs will approach it differently than others. Arsenal’s decision to fly to Manchester just a few hours before kick-off seemed a strange one. Within 20 minutes, they had suffered two injuries which did not help their evening.

City were increasingly fluent and comfortably superior.

Weird as it sounds, there was not too much resting on the game and that is something we may have to get used to over the next few weeks.

Once Liverpool have won the league later this month what else is there to anticipate? A relegation contest and a tussle for fourth and fifth places.

Much has been made of the fact that every one of the remaining Premier League games will be shown live on TV. But how many of those will mean very much?

Our love of the game will doubtless get us through. We have missed it after all. And it will get better than this. it will have to.

After a three-month break, it was perhaps too much to ask that the football should be particularly compelling. it certainly was not that.

But in the absence of any riveting play this was perhaps exactly what we needed.

This was something familiar, something normal — a good old controversy about a goal that should have been given but wasn’t.

sympathy is due to Chris Wilder’s sheffield United, even if he will know his team did not play particularly well.

The Yorkshireman had spoken beforehand of the need for his team to create their tempo. Over the course of 94 largely guileless minutes at Villa Park, Wilder’s team did not manage that but they still should have been awarded a goal.

Why Michael Oliver’s watch didn’t buzz to signal one when Villa’s young goalkeeper Orjan Nyland fumbled a free-kick over the line only became clear later on. Why the VAR officials didn’t stop play to have a look for themselves only they will know.

But that none of the things that should have happened actually did happen at least served to place us back in to familiar territory.

We have been here before and it felt strangely comfortable.

it stopped us, at least, from talking about the lack of a crowd. it stopped us having to listen just one more time to details of the safety protocols. By the time the first ball was kicked on Project Restart, we knew all about the corner flags being disinfected. We did not need to hear it again.

it was flat in the Midlands. But then we mustn’t blame coronavirus for everything. There were plenty of poor football matches prior to the lockdown and perhaps this was just another one.

in Manchester, it rained biblically just before the game. Arsenal chose to play not in their usual red and white but in dark blue (against opponents also wearing blue) and Mesut Ozil was deemed by his manager not to be a suitable player for an away fixture. Before half-time there was a terrible defensive error by David Luiz.

All in all, another dose of familiarity on several levels. When the clumsy Brazilian saw red for bringing down Riyad Mahrez for a second-half penalty it truly was like old times.

it was a dismal scene as the sky darkened over the Etihad stadium ahead of kick-off.

Just momentarily, it made one wonder if it was all really worth it, so joyless did it seem.

There had been more on the line for the teams in the first game. Villa are in a relegation fight while sheffield United have a real chance of finishing in the European places.

Understandable, then, that Wilder’s frustrations at his team’s misfortune saw him confronting referee Oliver in the tunnel at half-time. Wilder’s protests were being made more calmly than we may have expected, indicative perhaps that watching his team in such an alien setting had not done much for his adrenaline levels.

What chance of such restraint being shown once the season eventually finds some kind of rhythm and momentum? And find itself, it surely will. hopefully.