The Ashes has me worried about the Premier League
Confronting the non-contest with "We're Sheff United, we'll be here next week."
Words: Sam Parry
I offer no apologies to the non-cricketing fan: I love the Ashes. The series so far, under lights, on cloudy mornings, in the beating sun, has been an unpredictable and rollicking romp. At points, every ball has felt like a corner in the last minute of injury time. Yes, it may be stating the obvious to suggest that Australia have more, better cricketers. But the toil and slog it has taken them to bring about a 2-0 lead have been the labour of a true contest. And contests, the closer the better, make for the best sporting occasions.
That’s not what we’ll get in the top flight. The Premier League is more a spectacle of narrative than it is competition. In the long sweep of a season, there are title contenders, top fourers, top sixers, mid-tablers, relegation scrappers and relegation certainties. All of them are predictably predictable. There is no possibility of Manchester City being relegated and there is no possibility of Sheffield United winning the league. That’s just the way of things.
That means that each fan base has to tell itself a particular story of success before the season starts, so that when the season ends, we can judge ourselves, not by competition but by perception (I’d snap your hand off for 17th now…etc). The perception for each club is different, but what this amounts to is varying degrees of competition between pockets of teams rather than the whole league. That is not exactly a new phenomenon except today those pockets are more pronounced than ever before.
What worries me is the growing number of non-contests (Sheffield United versus Man City/Liverpool/Man U/Arsenal/Newcastle/Spurs etc). And how they might come to taint our perception to such a considerable degree that the cold winds of negativity fast-freeze our fanbase into a cynical torpor. Let’s face it: we’ve all been there, and recently too.
I worry about the precariousness of it all. I don’t fear relegation but the possibility of insidious pessimism. I suppose then, my fear is a consequence of experience. We all know where spiralling negativity leads and it’s not upwards.
Why has The Ashes prompted this fear? In part, it hasn’t; it’s been there since promotion was confirmed. But over two tests, watching the cricketing equivalent of that 4-5 defeat to Fulham in 2017, with all the drama and exhaustion and skill and wherewithal, it has reminded me just how much fun sport can be, win or lose. There are always moments. Like a gobsmacking Ndiaye twist and turn. Like a George Baldock yellow card. Like Sander Berge on the shoulder of the last defender. Like Sheffield United at their most thrilling. The closer the contest, the tighter the test, the better the spectacle.
Consider the inverse calculation: the non-contest. It’s something, as fans, we have to reconcile ourselves to. We’ll see plenty of one-sided matches where one team dominates another with inevitable consequences. Think City in the semi-final. Did we ever have a chance? I don’t think we did.
Now, of course, there are obvious differences between The Ashes and a top-flight season in English football. Test cricket is a high-margin sport played over hours and days. As a spectator, you have so much time to linger over the good and bad. Football is a low-margin sport played over minutes. And fans have little time to react beyond the moment of oohs and aahs, bollockings and bafflement. There is a greater intensity to watching football, which for me makes it the greatest sport on earth. But it’s also dangerous.
How we respond to non-contests after the fact can cast a long shadow. Recall the drudgery of our relegation season when game after game we expected little and enjoyed less. Yes, we beat Man United long after the writing was on the wall. Yes, there was and there will be upsets for us to enjoy. But by and large, the season ahead will be predictable. The outcome of a small number of winnable games will be the difference between relegation and survival. Those games—perhaps as few as twelve of them—will be the only true contests and thus, they will be difficult and unpredictable. And however well we play, good teams lose close contests: just ask Ben Stokes.
So here’s a plea: let’s enjoy the contests, and when we lose the non-contests, let’s do what we did against City and enjoy the day out, dust ourselves down, and go again. Doom-mongering begets doom-mongering. And we’re better off vanquishing the anger, guilt, depression, and denial in favour of accepting the reality of minutes and hours of non-competitive football ahead of us.
Faced with the consequences of the non-contest, we have a choice: do we get sucked into the predictable narratives peddled by the top-flight Twitterati, the naysaying columnists and the poorly-briefed pundits? Or do we crack on, plod along, and keep it real?
Great article. One of the things that contribute to feelings of frustration is that the media by and large fails to acknowledge that the league is set up as you say. There is rarely any genuine acknowledgment of the gulf in budgets between clubs, so while it may be mentioned in the build up, it is never used in the end to say “well what did you expect?”. Instead, the expensive team is lauded and the defeated club is often berated for not trying, for not making it a contest. Its like bragging about the battle of Mboto Gorge, and the British victory over “ten thousand Watutsi warriors armed to the teeth with kiwi fruit and dry guava halves" (one for Blackadder fans). Yet as fans we can’t help but be dragged along with it, and think maybe we SHOULD have tried harder to win a game in which we’re were hopelessly outclassed.
BANG ON!