Premier League Imperfections All Part of Appeal on Glorious Opening Weekend

Football, bloody hell.

Despite a three-day weekend of so little physical activity the sofa was still wedded to my backside when I finally succumbed to a shower on Monday morning, this gluttonous observer of Premier League fare is surely not alone in feeling as physically and mentally spent as any player. They only have to put it in for 90 minutes, what about the rest of us poor saps?

From Alexandre Lacazette scoring on his league debut for Arsenal in the first game of the weekend to Manchester United's Romelu Lukaku doing the same in the last, this was gloriously breathless stuff.

It was hard enough trying to comprehend David Silva wasn't Stephen Ireland and Kyle Walker-Peters wasn't a clone of Kyle Walker without having to digest Arsenal condensing their past decade into 90 hurtling minutes against Leicester City; Burnley—the Premier League's worst travellers since Dennis Bergkamp—winning at champions Chelsea; Wayne Rooney, on his second coming at Goodison Park, scoring for Everton 4,869 days since the last one; Dele Alli luring Jonjo Shelvey into a trap so obvious he probably stole it from Tom and Jerry; Huddersfield Town being top of the tree after spanking Crystal Palace, right up until Manchester United rolled back the years to do the same to West Ham United; Liverpool in a 3-3 draw at Watford demonstrating how brilliant they are going forward is directly proportional to how crap they are at the back; West Bromwich Albion scoring from a set piece.

Can't get over that last one.

As an advert for one of Britain's last remaining stable exports, it is hard to see how it could have been topped. No bad thing given the current rate of depreciation in the pound means the Premier League may need to prop up the rest of the economy before long.

If Carlsberg did opening weekends, it would probably be full of people saying "is that the only thing they've got on draught," but this wasn't like that at all. It was genuinely brilliant.

Forget doping in sport, what the authorities want to be looking into is whether Premier League executive chairman Richard Scudamore scripted the whole thing. Football just isn't supposed to be this good, this dramatic, this neat. Well, it is but rarely is. It had a whiff of wrestling to it.

When Paul Pogba capped off a performance befitting of an £89 million millstone, with a lovely taken fourth and final goal for Manchester United in their win over West Ham, it wouldn't have been that much of a surprise had Paul Bearer stepped from the home bench carrying the ashes of the previous three seasons since Sir Alex Ferguson's retirement. Maybe now is finally the right time to get them scattered.

Presumably last season United were often scheduled as the final game of the weekend as a charitable act on the part of broadcasters. Channel 5 do something similar when they put on a well-known film like Big or The Goonies on Sunday afternoons so you can dip in and out while getting prepped for work or maybe even take a nap through the middle of it in the knowledge catching up won't be a problem as you've seen it so many times before. When you wake up, either Chunk is doing the truffle shuffle or United are drawing with a mid-table side at Old Trafford.

There was no sleeping on Sunday. It was like watching a different team, as though Tom Hanks in Big had grown a pair and got together with the older woman instead of slinking home in a giant suit. Nemanja Matic was imperious to the point it was almost as though the Serb had found a strut, while Lukaku rose, literally, to the challenge laid down by Jose Mourinho to become a leader by scoring United's first two goals in the 4-0 win.

United were aggressive, dynamic and ruthless all over the pitch. They were none of those things last term. Has anyone mentioned Mourinho's record in second seasons?

It's hard to think of a campaign when sartorial choices have ever proved integral to its outcome, but it was interesting to note how over the weekend Mourinho was dressed as Antonio Conte and vice versa. After being highly flammable throughout much of last term, Mourinho ditched the polyester trackie for a smart suit, while slouched in sportswear, the purportedly none-too-happy-one Conte looked about as shabby as his substitutes' bench.

The pair seem to have swapped moods, too. While Mourinho claims he's on fire, Conte looks as though he's ready to start one. Some bookies have installed him as the new favourite to be the first Premier League manager to leave. Keep your money in your pocket.

Neither can hold a candle to Pep Guardiola in the style stakes. The chino hasn't had the best press over the weekend, but the Catalan did his utmost to reclaim them for right-minded folk by pulling off a pitch-perfect, Ivy League preppy look at Brighton on Saturday. It was probably the highlight of Manchester City's comfortable 2-0 win on the coast, though Kyle Walker was also very good on his debut. Expect Tony Pulis to own the touchline next weekend by rocking up looking like a Berkeley professor.

Burnley winning 3-2 against a Chelsea side that finished the game at Stamford Bridge with nine men is arguably the biggest opening-day shock since Mick Quinn scored a hat-trick at Highbury in the 1992/93 curtain raiser as Coventry City beat Arsenal 3-0. Burnley won seven points away from home last season; Chelsea dropped six points at home.

With Gary Cahill and Cesc Fabregas now both suspended for next weekend's game against Tottenham Hotspur at Wembley, it's hard to envisage they will exorcise the ghost of 2015/16 any time soon.

As a supporter, there are few more edifying experiences in football than watching a new striker score on the opening weekend, so at least Chelsea can draw a slither of consolation from Alvaro Morata excelling off the bench to ensure each of the league's three new £50 million-plus frontmen got off the mark at the first attempt. Liverpool's Mohamed Salah will be equally relieved to have added his name to the list of goalscoring debutants after a club-record move from Roma.

Money might not be able to buy you love, but it can seemingly buy you goals. Huddersfield Town's record £11.5 million-signing Steve Mounie scored 14 goals in Ligue 1 for Montpellier last season, just one fewer than Monaco's Kylian Mbappe. His brace helped the Terriers celebrate a return to the top flight for the first time since 1972 with a 3-0 victory at Selhurst Park.

If your team lost at the weekend and work is no better, steal yourself a few moments to watch Huddersfield fans celebrating on Saturday. That's what it's all about. Pure, undiluted passion.

Of course, one man's meat is another man's poison.

In his season preview for the New Statesman, the always engaging Daniel Harris wrote:

"The nature of the game itself is also particular to England. Of course, what constitutes excitement is subjective, and there is a thrill in, say, watching the kind aesthetic destructions or technical, cerebral battles more common elsewhere.

"But for those of us who expect football to agitate the elements of our psyche which, for the good of humanity, lie dormant in real life, then the artistry and intensity of English football is incomparable."

There is little cerebral about the Premier League. It is as loud as it is bloated, existing in a vortex of hype so deafening it seems the only way to make yourself heard is to wave green bills at it.

There's a line in the Roberto Bolano short story, The Insufferable Gaucho, that says "If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear." The reason why the Premier League is constantly being told it's not the best in the world is because it can't help itself from proclaiming as much to anyone in earshot. It's essentially the mate who feels compelled to say he's taking you for the best burger ever and then pulls into Burger King.

Manchester United lumping the ball forward to Marouane Fellaini in the Super Cup final, after realising trying to beat Real Madrid playing football would be like trying to beat Roger Federer playing underarm, was for its detractors a perfect example of how far the English game is behind its continental cousins. 

Given for nine-and-a-half months of the year the Premier League becomes a part of our fabric, journeying with us through the seasons with only summer providing a respite for both sides, accusations of bias are perhaps not without sound reason.

Maybe it's like what E.M. Forster said about the novel: "Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time." 

For purists who deem the Premier League to be about as refined as a restaurant menu that includes photos of the food, the slapdash to the point of being slapstick defending on show from each of Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea at the weekend exemplified why the Premier League is all fur coat and no knickers.

The lost art of defending has long since been a favourite topic of conversation for people who tend to spend a lot of time in kitchens at parties. When you come downstairs the morning after to find someone has left the fridge door open and it's flooded, more often than not it's actually an act of self-sabotage on the fridge's part in protest at having to listen to someone espousing the merits of the Catenaccio system.

All three of the aforementioned are regarded as serious title contenders. They conceded a combined total of nine goals against opponents that last season finished 12th (Leicester City), 16th (Burnley) and 17th (Watford). 

While it may just have been an aberration for Chelsea given they had the third best defensive record in their title-winning campaign last term, for Arsenal and Liverpool, these are long-standing issues that on the weekend's evidence clearly need significant work.

Arsenal were without their first-choice centre-halves Shkodran Mustafi and Laurent Koscielny, so it would be remiss to draw too stinging a conclusion, but given they finished up against Leicester with a midfielder at right back, two left-backs in central defence and a right-back at left back, it's fair to say a 4-3 win owed as much to luck as it did design.

Credit must go to Arsene Wenger for a pair of substitutions that culminated in a pair of goals. Olivier Giroud's almost violent header may still be the best of its type come May.

It was Liverpool's defending at Watford that gave rise to the first pundit straightener of the season. When Jamie Carragher, in the middle of going off on one in the Sky Sports studio, was interrupted by Jamie Redknapp saying something and nothing about Liverpool target Virgil van Dijk, it was as though he had taken a leak in his former team-mate's coffee.

At times when Redknapp is talking, his co-pundits look at him with kind, soft eyes, as one might with a child taking an age to explain what their latest creation with crayons or fuzzy felt is supposed to be. Not this time.

The most untimely of commercial breaks denied us the sight of Carragher stripping down to his briefs and demanding to have it out once and for all. Off-air time was almost certainly spent in silence, punctuated only by the sound of anchor Simon Thomas awkwardly shuffling his papers. Glorious broadcasting.

But now's not the time to be negative. For one week only, the Premier League was genuinely the best league (ever). And if you disagree, there's a fridge door that needs shutting.

Football, bloody hell indeed.