Off The Bar — Double Agent Cech, Fifth Beatle Van Gaal, Tuxedo Triumph

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  • Football found solace with the return of the Premier League.

    After two quiet months of nibbling on piece-meal pre-season, Off The Bar can finally sink it’s satirical teeth back into the brand new Premier League season. The opening weekend certainly provided more than enough to salivate over.

    Meeting up with the Premier League after a few months apart is always a worry for Off The Bar. Will she be exactly as I fondly remembered her or has she changed? Happily, the answer is a bit of yes and no — Lee Cattermole still collects yellow cards with the hunger of a peckish bee gulping down nectar, Gareth Barry still has the gingerly pace of a snail with a groin strain and the ban on Premier League players growing hair on the sides of their heads is holding strong. Very strong.

    Yet the arrival of a tuxedo, double agents, old school phones and post-match Beatles karaoke sessions illustrates that the league has learned some tremendous new tricks to keep the old spark well and truly alive. Welcome back, you brilliantly beautiful, brilliantly bizarre league.

    Charming Chancel

    The attire routine for players arriving at a stadium has been tried, tested and cemented over the years. You must wear a rudimentary club suit and tie and a pair of headphones so enormous that you look like a 1960s Russian cosmonaut.  None such regulation dressware for new Newcastle United signing Chancel Mbemba. Chancel (if he’s not nicknamed ‘The Chancellor’ in the changing room, he absolutely should be) rocked up at St James’ Park on his debut wearing a devastatingly handsome super sharp tuxedo and a delightful ‘Yup, I look outstanding’ grin. Milan, Paris, pack up your many bags and move your catwalks to North East England — Newcastle is the new fashion capital of the globe.

    Sure he was at fault for losing Pelle for Southampton’s opening goal, but in the greater scheme of things, what does that really matter?  Chancel could have knocked in a hat-trick of own goals and would have easily notched up an 8 out of 10 player rating having racked up enough pre-match praise and goodwill to go straight into Newcastle United’s Hall of Fame. Beyond entering the stadium via a zip wire and landing perfectly in the centre-back position mere seconds before kick-off, the Congolese defender could not have made a better audition to be the next James Bond.

    Cech Mate

    Chancel will need a mysterious and duplicitous rival in his blockbuster reprisal of cinema’s greatest franchise, and it seems the Premier League has one ready made in the form of Petr Cech. Far from offering Arsenal the assurance to make them genuine contenders to take Chelsea’s title crown, Cech lost them all three big ones against West Ham on Sunday — that was courtesy of a performance about as sprightly and reassuring as a prison run by a family of sloths.

    Was this all part of Mourinho’s masterplan? Has he done the ultimate double – the double agent? Does Cech finish up training sessions by tapping out his findings in a Morse code transmitted to Mourinho’s Stamford Bridge underground bunker? Does Cech sit outside the Arsenal boardroom dressed in a trench coat and hat reading a paper with peeping holes cut through the middle? If you collate the number coordinates of all of Cech’s distribution from hand on Sunday, does it reveal the exact date, time and figure of Arsenal’s last attempt to buy Karim Benzema? It all sounds a tad far-fetched, so we’ll be filing this one alongside other infamous conspiracies — such as sceptics insisting the 1969 moon landing was faked and Sunderland’s back four denying the existence of defensive cohesion and communication.

    – INSIDE STORY: Carpi FC & Frosinone preparing for life in Serie A
    – DEA GEA: Van Gaal hopeful ‘keeper will stay at Utd
    – GALLERY: The EPL’s biggest opening day upsets

    Ringing And Singing The Changes

    With Jose achieving such nuanced communication with his employees, it was charming to see Newcastle manager Steve McClaren stick to the basics on his return to the Premier League. Sat high up in the heights of St James’ Park, he communicated his orders via an old school phone and receiver hand set. An investment of £35 million pounds has bought the Magpies an influx of new players this summer, but clearly a cordless telephonic device is an expense too far for owner Mike Ashley. Combine that piece of 1980s equipment with the footage of McClaren screaming orders down the phone and suddenly the former England manager was transformed into Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street — ‘Sell! Sell! Sell!’ — all very good practice for next year’s summer transfer window no doubt.

    Despite McClaren’s greatest efforts it was Louis van Gaal who won the award for most eccentric managerial incident of the opening weekend. In his post match conference, he gave us a fleeting but highly enjoyable taste of his singing voice, giving reporters a few bars from The Beatles smash hit ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ — a gleeful nod to his very own 64th birthday which he was celebrating on Saturday. Louis is clearly a huge fan of the rock and roll legends — presumably the early years when the group invariably played a flat back four on vocals but also had the tactical flexibility and intelligence to revert to three at the back and a lone singer up front.

    Battle of the Man Buns

    Whilst the shy and retiring Dutchman was crooning away, Manchester United’s drab 1-0 win gave their fans preciously little to sing about. Indeed both sides had a complete absence of creativity and flair — it had all the dynamism of a slow motion version of cult classic video game Pong. The only real battle came when Nacer Chadli and Daley Blind faced off in the highly anticipated ‘Battle of the Man Buns’. Cornered by the aforementioned ban on side hair, Chadli and Blind have focussed on their head lids instead, both sprouting and maintaining a hair knot.

    Beyond video technology and offside laws, this new hairstyle trend has to be the most divisive development in the history of the beautiful game. Ordinarily we’d be inclined to say it’s a follicle abomination that deserves an automatic three-game ban, but the fact that the mighty Zlatan Ibrahimovich also sports the parcel of hair atop his bonce softens our disdain considerably. Just a two game ban then. To be fair, Blind’s man bun doubles up as a valuable bellwether for Manchester United’s renaissance — both projects are ambitious goals gradually taking the desired shape but are very clearly not quite there yet, likely needing more support up top and at least another year to come to full fruition.

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