Modern soccer has misplaced its soul to risk-averse ways extra boring than Michael Owen
BRENT A GOB: This week, Harry Brent’s blasting modern football tactics and the supporters who can’t stop booing their club’s former players
Our man Harry Brent is raging in his latest column
Modern football has become a glorified version of basketball and it sickens me more than Chelsea turning a two-goal season from Liam Delap into £20million worth of profit.
I know big-versus-small fixtures have always been one-sided, but these days they’re duller than a Friday night at Michael Owen’s house, listening to him explain his favourite lawnmowing techniques.
Every game follows the same boring script: endless horseshoe-passing around the box, followed by the occasional half-baked counter attack. Once that fizzles out, both sides casually jog back to set up camp at the 18-yard line like a couple of NBA teams retreating to the key – and the horseshoeing resumes. It’s predictable, unimaginative and toothless. In other words, it’s Tottenham.
Football matches nowadays are just a festival of blocked shots and predictable passes(Image: Getty)
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Matches aren’t won by magic or flair anymore; they’re won by forcing your opponent into a microscopic positional error. Like Jake Humphrey, the obsessive detail is impressive – but it’s so insufferable it makes me want to put my foot through the telly.
The Carabao Cup games last week were chock-full of this sterile garbage. There was no fluidity, no chaos – just sanitised, risk-averse nonsense, like an overbearing mother forcing her teenager to wear floaties in the pool.
I don’t blame the weaker teams for shutting up shop, but does their survival strategy really have to be mandatory-online-health-and-safety-seminar levels of tedious to sit through?
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I’m sick of watching 90 minutes of blocked shots and uber-safe five-yard passes. I’m sick of knowing exactly where the ball is going 15 seconds before it gets there. Not to sound all Nigel Farage-y, but things were infinitely better back in’t day .
I’m not saying the Beautiful Game is dead – but like Bonnie Blue, it’s on its knees and just begging for someone to inject a bit of shameless, unfiltered filth into it.
Stop booing former players, you fragile dweebs
English football fans have picked up this brainless new habit – booing literally every player who used to play for their team – and it confuses me more than the concept of reliability confuses Robert Sanchez.
Brighton fans showered Joao Pedro with plenty of verbal abuse during Chelsea’s 4-3 win over the Seagulls
Back in my day, booing was strictly reserved for actual wrong’uns – the Sol Campbell cross-town snakes, the ‘Cashley’ Cole mercenaries, or the Craig ‘just a genuinely unpleasant bloke’ Bellamy types. But nowadays, literally anyone who moves anywhere is treated like a war criminal.
On Sunday, Sussex-born, pier-frequenting, Fatboy Slim-loving Joao Pedro was vilified for daring to join Brighton’s bitter, ancient south-coast rivals… Chelsea.
Unless I missed the part where he set fire to the club shop, there was zero drama when he left last summer. He didn’t go on strike, he didn’t slag anyone off, and Brighton walked away with a lovely pile of cash.
As transfers go, it was about as uneventful as Scott Carson’s Manchester City career. And yet, every time he touched the ball: “BOOOO!”
Chelsea fans aren’t saints either. They did the same to Conor Gallagher – their baby-faced academy workhorse who they practically pushed out the door to Atletico Madrid. I get it, he plays for Tottenham now, but hating him is like hating Paddington Bear – it just makes you look like a miserable b******.
Am I a nostalgic wimp for thinking you’re allowed to wish ex-players well? Or is football fandom so completely brain-melted that we’re five minutes away from booing the club mascot for taking a second job at Nando’s?
