I usually do a review about what has gone on during the weekend sports wise, but this week i decided to branch out because so much has happened. From two English teams making it to the Champions League final to promotion and relegation in the lower rungs of football, to a massive unification fight on Sunday morning, it was a good week to be a sports fan.
There was Premier League action on Monday night and the less said the better, when West Ham are the best of four sides on show you know its not the best round of matches. If your Monday nights highlight is watching Jesse Lingard play football then I suggest you find something better to do with you time. Try knitting or playing penny up the wall, or even talking to the significant other in your life, but if you’re looking forward to West Ham and Burnley or Wolves and West Brom lets be honest, you haven’t got a significant other.
Night and day in terms of quality and interest was on Tuesday. The first of two Champions League semi finals saw Manchester City and PSG playing on a snow covered Etithad pitch. City with a slim advantage proved just how good they are and just how far PSG are behind they front runners in European football. When PSG realised they weren’t going to go to go through they decided to play the last 20 mins like petulant school kids, like the older year group kicking fuck out of the younger kids when they’re being beaten. Frankly they were fucking embarrassing for that second half spell, you have to feel for Poch, getting kicked out of Spurs for not a lot and now likely to use his job at PSG less than 6 months after taking over, because he can’t win the Champions League with or without Mbappe.
With one Champions League final place settled all that was left to find out was could Chelsea hold out against Real Madrid, would Real Madrid shithouse their way to another final or would they fall short. They fell short, Real were really poor and never looked like going through in truth. After the game Hazard thought it would be a good time to have a laugh and joke with his old team mates, he will no doubt ensue the same treatment Gareth Bale did and be put out to pasture by Zidane, I wonder if he’s any good at golf? Fair play to Chelsea though, a team transformed since they brought in Tuchel.
The secondary European competition held its semi finals on Thursday night, Manchester United’s game against Roma already a dead rubber, with only something catastrophic stopping them from reaching the final. In the other game Arsenal, who should have been dead and gone after the first leg but by some chance were still in the tie. But Arsenal will be Arsenal and they were fucking useless on the night, failing to muster a decent chance, and king of the Europa League Unai Emery pulled off yet another amazing feat against his old side. Arsenal need a massive clear out, a new manager a new ethos and a new squad, a total rebuild that will take years, they really will be stagnant until they get rid of the likes of David Luiz and Willian, if the powers that be at that club think Granit Xhaka is the long awaited replacement to Patrick Viera and a real enforcer then they need to all take a long hard look at themselves.
A question that was posed to me on Friday night was, is Brendan Rodgers the biggest bottler in management? He’s bottled the League with Liverpool, bottled ten in a row with Celtic, all be it by leaving to go to Leicester. He then bottled the top four last year, and could possibly be bottling the top 4 this year. all he needs to do now would be to take the Spurs job and then the bottle jobs would have a bottle job in charge of bottling games, perfection. His Leicester side made Newcastle look like the top 4 team on Friday night. Conceding 4 goals to this Newcastle side isn’t fantastic at the best of times, but to do it against what was the easiest on paper assignment left in the league this season is really not good, they face an uphill battle now to keep their spot in the Champions League for next season.
We’d made it to Saturday, and Spurs were Spurs and lost away at Leeds to put a dent in their Europa League claims. Harry Kane looks so pissed off with things at the moment, and who can blame him, coming into his prime years with little or nothing to show for it, he surely has to be off in the summer, his bottom lip is sticking out more and more as the weeks go by, by the end of the season he’d probably be able to get a disc in it. The game nobody cared about on Saturday saw Sheffield United play Palace, were the Eagles rubber stamped their place in the Premier League for next season, where they will once again play Norwich City for a season after they went up from the Championship as winners, before they in all likelihood are relegated by March again.
While the Sheffield United game was on promotion was being settled in League Two, Cambridge and Cheltenham already confirmed as going up but it was yet to be seen if Bolton could do the business. They did it in style beating Crawley 4-1, after being 17th in January, a run of results that saw them fly up the league was fucking amazing, what a job Ian Evatt has done there, it’s nothing short of miraculous, for all the people saying the jobs Pep and Tuchel have done at City and Chelsea is great spare a thought for Evatt. A truly remarkable achievement, one that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Later that day City played Chelsea and denied City the chance to win the league in front of all their fans at home… Changes rung by both teams after their midweek antics and we didn’t get to see a full rehearsal of the Champions League final, which on Sunday night as I write this is being reported as being switched from Istanbul to Wembley. City can win the title they’ve known was theirs for month if results go their way as Manchester United play twice before City travel to Newcastle on Friday night.
Lastly on Saturday night Liverpool kept up their slim top four hopes at home to Southampton, winning 2-0 in a game I didn’t watch in all honesty, I was asleep by half time to get myself up early to watch pound for pound star Canelo fight unbeaten Billy Joe Saunders, I had thought all week that Billy didn’t have the power to gain any respect out of Canelo and he’d walk him down and slowly break him down with body shots and then take him out in the second half of the fight, and that proved to be the case. A vicious uppercut towards the end of the 8th causing all the damage that was needed. Trainer Mark Tibbs pulling Saunders out before the start of round 9, a stoppage I was glad to see, he couldn’t see, he was going out against one of the hardest hitters I have ever seen, and would have been stopped.
He suffered multiple fractures to his orbital bone from the uppercut, and is likely to have surgery in the States, although the irony is not lost on me after his comments about Daniel Dubios when he took and knee and was counted out against Joe Joyce a few months back, saying “if my two eye sockets were broken, my jaw was broken, my teeth were out, my nose was smashed, my brain was beaten, i was not stopping until I was knocked out or worse. I don’t agree with a man taking the knee and letting the ref count him out”
He will now be called a quitter and the Dubious quotes were flashed everywhere afterwards, but it was a smart choice, like him or loathe him, Billy Joe is one of the most gifted fighters the UK has seen. He can live to fight another day, finally on the fight, while DAZN is fantastic value at £1.99 a month, not that it will stay that price when Hearn jumps ship to them when his Sky deal is up in July, the current US commentary line up is fucking abysmal, I think I would have screamed if I’d have heard them call him BJ Saunders one more time, they make Adam Smith look like the crème de la crème.
Bleary eyed we’d made it to Sunday, Wolves played Brighton in the early game, Wolves realising that with an opposition down to ten men they’re still a half decent side. Coming from behind to leave Brighton on the cusp but not quite there in terms of Premier League survival. Edinson Cavani rubber stamped Manchester United’s win against Aston Villa, people finally realising he’s a decent player, now he’s scored some goals in the Premier League, Cavani has always been the bollocks, he was described to me before as a mix between Andy Carroll and Luis Suarez, if you took all the best attributes of those two players you’d get something like Cavani.
West Ham played Everton in what should have been the best game of the day, sadly like most of the games this weekend it didn’t get anywhere close to being as good as it was billed. Calvert-Lewin’s run, touch and finish the obvious highlight in a game I had no interest in, as my eyes started to sting from the early start.
Last and very very much least this sporting week was Arsenal and West Brom, another game I had little to no interest in, a game that Arsenal should have walked against a piss poor and doomed West Brom, and that was in fact the case. West Brom are that bad even fucking Willian scored. And colossal waste of money Nicholas Pepe too, that should be enough to tell any team they’re not good enough to be in the league. Big Sam will have to have an extra pint of white wine tonight to help ease the pain of his first relegation, I imagine him pouring white wine and Bisto down his throat at the same time while he has Mike Basset on repeat to forget the last few months.
Cheers, The Fat Man.
Fat Lad Sports 