IS WINTER BREAK JUST AN EXCUSE TO HAVE A BOOZE-UP IN THE SUN?
So much for Premier League stars taking a needed rest...
ONE of the old guard actually spared a thought for t hose l eft without t he game that makes their world go round, during the first Premier League winter break.
‘I enjoy the football and have a great lifestyle,’ said Everton coach Duncan Ferguson. ‘ But the fans can’t go on holiday. They’re missing out. That’s why I don’t agree with the winter break.’
For the players, though, the only debate during their 13-day intervals, staggered over two weekends, seems to have been whether to rock up at the Five Palm Jumeirah or the Cove Beach, two of the more favoured Dubai establishments.
Images of James Maddison, a fully signed-up member of the Cove Beach set, captured him tipping back a magnum of booze at a daytime pool party with his team-mate Ben Chilwell, Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish and Chelsea’s Ross Barkley. This was not entirely consistent with the image of Leicester’s shattered players ‘ running on empty’ painted days earlier by their manager Brendan Rodgers.
Dubai has become a Premier League social melting pot these past two weeks. While Maddison and Co moved on from the poolside to the Mantis nightclub, where the 23-year-old was downing shots at 4am, the Five Palm Jumeirah’s jetski guy told how Newcastle’s Allan Saint- Maximin and Manchester United’s Brandon Williams had been out riding the waves.
Stormzy’s concert at the city’s RedFest DXB on the winter break’s first Friday was a stellar attraction for players. The Cove Beach brigade, along with Tottenham’s Ryan Sessegnon and Chelsea’s Tammy Abraham, were all in attendance. Even the injured Marcus Rashford flew in from Miami to attend.
Some of Brighton’s players settled for the more humdrum, if images of Alireza Jahanbakhsh, Leandro Trossard, Shane Duffy and Pascal Gross at a table full of drinks and later appearing to inhale from balloons, are anything to go by.
Sheffield United manager Chris Wilder needed this like a hole in the head after three wins in five had lifted his side to fifth place.
‘I don’t agree with the break,’ he said before taking his team to Dubai. ‘I wanted to roll on. Players are fit and healthy.’
Another Premier League coach agrees there could be negative consequences. ‘ We’ll only see when things start again. It can take time to build back the intensity and the rhythms,’ he says.
Not all players conform to the same picture. James Milner, that man-machine of a player, was seen at the back of the Anfield home dug-out on the night of Liverpool’s FA Cup replay against Shrewsbury Town, which Jurgen Klopp had boycotted and effectively excluded his senior players from attending. Milner, recovering from injury and badly needing game time, asked if he could attend and ended up giving a team talk.
Mo Salah posted a photo of himself in the Melwood gym. ‘Back from the holiday I didn’t go on,’ he tweeted.
Luke Shaw described paintballing and squad dinners on Manchester United’s break in Marbella. ‘ It’s been hard work but probably the big bonus has been the bonding side of it,’ he insisted.
It should be said that the law of unintended consequences has always applied to breaks like this. Bob Paisley established a routine of taking his Liverpool players on one Saturday night away in Llangollen, North Wales, when they were regularly winning titles.
A dispute after beer had been taken in the picturesque town’s Bryn Howell Hotel in 1981 ended with Ray Kennedy throwing a bar stool at landlord Albert Lloyd and spending a night behind bars at Wrexham police station with Jimmy Case. Both were fined £150.
But for all the risks, physios universally welcome the new break. The FA anticipate benefits for Gareth Southgate’s England team at this season’s European Championships too. However, Gary Lewin, a physio with Sven Goran Eriksson’s England, believes one weekend is not actually enough.
‘Unfortunately some people will just think they’re all on holiday but that’s an attitude we need to get rid of,’ he says. ‘We argued to miss two weekends so it was a three-week break, so ten days off and ten days training.’
The debate among top coaches is whether the break should have come sooner after the frantic Christmas/New Year schedule.
‘The talk is of whether this is the best moment,’ says a senior member of staff at one Premier League club. ‘We could be more scientific about looking at injuries and when the general strain is taking its greatest toll.’
Indeed, a study by PhysioRoom. com in 2018 demonstrated most Premier League injuries occur in December and January, about 135 across the top flight.
A mid-January break has proved impossible until now because the Premier League has simply not been willing to permit one. The rights holders and their money are king. It took the FA’s willingness to shift next month’s FA Cup fifth round to midweek to carve out space, which the Premier League has used to straddle a round of fixtures over two weekends. They won’t even to call it a winter break.
‘We are calling it a mid-season player break,’ the then PL chief executive Richard Scudamore said when it was announced in June 2018. ‘We’re not calling it a winter break. Why is that? Because we’re not breaking.’
Spain and Germany know what a real break looks like. There was no football for two weeks between December 21 and January 4 in La Liga and the Bundesliga — which has four fewer rounds of competition than the Premier League and only one cup competition, with single legs. Players had a 28-day break this season. No-one complains in these countries because the break is part of their football culture — and because everyone just settles back to watch the Premier League.
Both Arsene Wenger and Mauricio Pochettino have said they wouldn’t want it any other way.
‘I would cry if there was a winter break,’ Wenger once remarked. ‘It’s a very important part of us being popular in the world that nobody works at Christmas and everybody watches the Premier League.’
Yet plenty of managers bank on the pause being an elixir in the days ahead. ‘We’ve got 13 games over the next three-and-a-half months,’ says Newcastle’s Steve Bruce. ‘So to ask the players [to go without] is ridiculous.’
Burnley’s Sean Dyche claims it helps a small squad like his. ‘I think this break is geared up for the superpowers, left in all sorts of competitions, but we’ve had a clutch of injuries and it helps the bodies to settle, repair and be ready to go.’
But the way a 17-day break has taken the wind out of Steven Gerrard’s Rangers sails — they won four on the bounce beforehand but
‘I DON’T AGREE WITH THE BREAK. I DON’T SEE THE POINT. PLAYERS ARE SO FIT...’
have l ost t wice since. It is a cautionary lesson.
When Alex Ferguson was manager at Aberdeen he would carefully carve out a week’s break for his players in between matches, selecting a weekend when they were playing in Glasgow to fly out from there for a week in Marbella or Mallorca. There was one designated night out for the players with a strict curfew and a warning, according to Alex McLeish, about what had to happen when they got back.
‘He drilled it into us that we couldn’t go back and pick up our season slowly. We had to be on it.’
MEANWHILE... THESE TWO FOUND ANOTHER WAY TO LOOK SILLY!