"Today, everything is different. There's no action!"
Henry Hill of 'Goodfellas' was a fanatical football fan working a 9-to-5.
The first thing I noticed about working in an office four days a week is that I can’t watch the random Tuesday afternoon football. (OK, there were other things. It’s been a minute since I sardined into a New York subway train at rush hour or packed a sad desk lunch.) It’s not that I’m sitting there at my desk on a Tuesday thinking about the football—I don’t have time—but when I get home, I realize the football world kept spinning without me. Across the last couple of years as a work-from-home freelancer, I could arrange my work around a midweek game worth watching, but no more. Now I just try to catch the highlights. Like Henry Hill said, “I have to wait around like everyone else.” Or at least like the Americans with 9-to-5s.
This week, I missed all the Premier League stuff, including Arsenal’s treacherous trip to Brentford. Probably for the best there, though I did not miss the opportunity to get perturbed about how Brentford can score a long-throw set-piece goal and it’s not considered evil. That’s true—it’s not—but just imagine the news cycle if their opponents on the day had done the same thing. Clearly, the widespread concerns about playing style in the league this year are not applied universally.1
I also missed Atlético Madrid’s demolition of Barcelona. The highlight reel for that one was almost unbelievable. Atléti could have been 5-0 up at the half as their opponents put on a circus in a cup semifinal. Time and again, Barça’s (in)famous high line was slashed to pieces with simple patterns of play as Atléti boss Diego Simeone near-exploded in satisfaction on the sideline. It was suicidal football from Hansi Flick’s side, and it was enough to make me think Barcelona cannot win the Champions League this season. They can win La Liga by blowing teams away—they’re still probably the world’s greatest attacking outfit—but you can’t win a two-legged cup tie playing like that away from home. At one point, Barça’s back line attempted an offsides trap in the opposition half.
But I missed all that, at least live. Like most other football-crazed Americans, I have to piece together what happened when I come up for air after a long day swimming in other waters. It’s a tough time of year in that regard, as the return of the domestic cups forces league fixtures into midweek and the Champions League knockout phase looms. I’ll have to take a sick day if Arsenal make another semifinal so I can go to O’Hanlon’s. Don’t tell my boss.
I’ll still write about football and I’ve got a very big project in the works for The Football Weekend. But I plan to spend less time reacting to individual matches2 or pontificating on who’s up and who’s down. Everybody else is doing that anyway, and I’ve been shifting in recent months towards the other things I (hopefully) bring to the table. More on that soon, but thanks as always for being here.
Yes, I know Brentford are not competing for the title and are historically a much “smaller” club than Arsenal. My point is that fans and observers are not offended by set piece goals or 18-yard-box shithousery on principle. They don’t like Arsenal doing it.
Don’t read the first footnote!