What are you going to do now? Fear not, you may be feeling bereft after the last month’s passing but, if social reintegration doesn’t appeal, then there is always recourse to the low background hum that, since festivities in Brazil started on 12 June, has been the steady, slow, relentless revolving of the wider footballing world. In fact you’ve missed so much that the World Cup might, once you’ve caught up, seem like little but a dream – in which case you should, at least, be wide awake for Sheriff Tiraspol v Sujeska Niksic …
The Premier League transfer wheel turned slowly
It did until last week anyway, when the deals involving Alexis Sánchez and Luis Suárez managed for a few hours apiece to outshine anything happening in South America. Sweeter, though, are the transfers that go through in the dead of domestic football’s World Cup night – when clubs attempt helplessly to regain fans’ attention or, just as often, hope they will be too distracted to notice.
Aston Villa have done a fine job of the latter, adding Kieran Richardson to their early-summer splurge while ensuring that the casual fan would still have to double-check which club he, Philippe Senderos and Joe Cole are all playing for these days. At that twilight hour moves such as Swansea’s swoop for Bafétimbi Gomis can easily evade the senses and skirt round awkward questions involving Wilfried Bony.
In general there is not too much to feel ashamed of at this early stage: Hull were content to tell the world about their spend of roughly £15m on Jake Livermore and Robert Snodgrass, while West Ham seemed pleased enough with their £3.75m acquisition of the Ipswich left-back Aaron Cresswell and a £7m outlay on Anderlecht’s powerhouse Cheikou Kouyaté. The free signing of Joleon Lescott looks like astute business by the new West Brom manager, Alan Irvine, who felt embattled enough to plead for time at his first press conference, while Newcastle can rest fairly certain that their new forward Siem de Jong, from Ajax, will serve them more effectively than his brother Luuk did last season.
The transfer machinations that ran concurrently to the World Cup did have two comforting certainties beyond death and taxes: Southampton and Liverpool. The latter spent £25m on the former’s Adam Lallana, having already given them around a sixth of that for Rickie Lambert, while Liverpool also hoovered up Bayer Leverkusen’s Emre Can and Lazar Markovic, and remain poised for Divock Origi, the aforementioned Bony and another player from Southampton, Dejan Lovren. Ronald Koeman, who took the Saints job as the rest of us obsessed over Germany’s 4-0 defeat of Portugal, has redressed some of the balance by signing Dusan Tadic and Graziano Pellè from the Dutch league, but arrived too late to stop Luke Shaw’s Manchester United move edging to its conclusion.
United have, themselves, been busy enough – Ander Herrera consigning last summer’s embarrassment to the past by joining from Athletic Bilbao – and Manchester City caused few surprises with the signings of Fernando from Porto and Bacary Sagna from Arsenal.
The most left-field piece of transfer news from the last month? Spurs have yet to sign any one and have not even thrown many bones. But, in this month of all months, no one has really noticed.
The Championship continued to split in two
What Fulham really needed after receiving £63,318,315 in television money in their relegation season was the promise that they would, in the worst-case scenario, double their money in parachute payments over the next four. They were kind enough to drop £11m of it into the ocean while we were rapt by the knockout stages, spending a record fee for a Championship club on the Leeds United striker Ross McCormack. The Scotsman is, as Leeds’ owner Massimo Cellino delicately put it, “a bloody good player”, but this madness – McCormack, 28 in August, scored 29 goals last season but topped 20 for only the second time in his career – is unlikely to end soon and another demoted side, Norwich, will not have spent lightly on strikers Lewis Grabban and Kyle Lafferty either. Anyone switching back on to the domestic game and expecting anything like a fair fight in Europe’s fourth most-watched league is in for a battle between haves and have-nots that is becoming steadily starker than anything we see in the Premier League arms race.
The music started playing in Europe
If the Champions League music strikes up in Andorra la Vella while Belgium and USA are in the throes of passion at the Arena Fonte Nova some 4,593 miles away, does it make a sound? Perhaps a squeak, because 323 people were there to see home side FC Santa Coloma and Banants, from Armenia, kick off the competition that will be consuming our energies a couple of months from now. In total six Champions League and 78 Europa League matches have taken place while our eyes have been averted and, if the slowed-down goal average in Brazil has troubled you, take succour from the fact that they have averaged 3.2 goals a game.
One of those goals provided a story that, in a quieter summer, would have been manna for romantics. Santa Coloma are relative Champions League mainstays if you tend to dig this deep, appearing in four of the last seven. But they had never come remotely close to qualifying for the second qualifying round – losing by at least three goals in each of their 10 European ties – and, despite winning that ethereal opener 1-0 at home, seemed to be heading out again when Banants went 3-1 up in Yerevan. Then their goalkeeper, Eloy Casals, who had been pushed up front for a 94th-minute free-kick, snapped up a loose ball in the box and fired them to an improbable victory – sparking scenes that are just as impressive for the Banants players’ utter desolation. “From now on I will think everything impossible is possible,” he said. Testing that theory on Tuesday were Maccabi Tel Aviv, to whom they narrowly lost 1-0 in the first leg.
Celtic, Cliftonville, St Patrick’s Athletic and The New Saints have all joined them at this stage; six teams from UK and Ireland made it through the Europa League’s early skirmishes but the Welsh teams Aberystwyth Town and Bangor City, beaten 9-0 and 8-0 on aggregate by Derry City and the Icelandic side Stjarnan respectively during World Cup rest days, must hope there was something just as compelling on the television.
The kits weren’t all right
You haven’t lived until you have attended a post-apocalyptic kit launch. Not now. These apparently come in “trilogies”; Arsène Wenger worked up a decent enough Saruman in Arsenal’s Thames-side jamboree, designed to mark their new partnership with Puma and manoeuvred expertly into some World Cup downtime last week, but the concurrent news of Sánchez’s signing was a blessed relief to those who wonder whether a new shirt should be A Story.
But kits are huge business now and Manchester United – who released their own new get-up in slightly more restrained fashion – have had to make a readjustment on that front after Nike announced that their 13-year partnership would be coming to a close. Cause for alarm? Not really: Adidas have stepped in with a deal worth £75m a year that, if they are to keep things remotely competitive, can be launched only via a reinterpretation of Dante’s Inferno on Salford Quays.
Championship clubs don’t yet launch like the big guns do but a couple of new shirt sponsorship deals can’t be allowed to lie. Sheffield Wednesday will walk out emblazoned with “Azerbaijan – Land of Fire” this season, intensifying the cuddly Caucasian state’s romance with the beautiful game, while Derby County’s “JUST EAT” shirts should provide soul food if Steve McClaren finds slim pickings at the second-tier table. As for Blackburn’s …
Others kept on keeping on
They may have fallen short in the second round against Belgium but the USA’s World Cup was widely viewed as a triumph on and off the pitch: Jürgen Klinsmann’s team won hearts and minds with their battling spirit while the level of engagement, with Barack Obama and Samuel L Jackson among those moved to tweet their support, was beyond expectations. All of which should be good news for Major League Soccer and the league was not keen on resting on its laurels while World Cup fever swept the country. After a two-week pause that took in most of the group stage, competition resumed less than 24 hours before the national team’s potentially decisive clash with Germany. It has rumbled on since: you’ll have missed Bradley Wright-Phillips’ late equaliser for New York Red Bulls against Toronto if you were catching up on sleep in preparation for Brazil v Chile and Colombia v Uruguay; the same player’s double at Houston, in response to a Giles Barnes goal, was one way to limber up for Brazil v Colombia. The remorseless return of MLS has, at least, allowed players to get back in the saddle: Chris Wondolowski’s goal for San Jose Earthquakes against leaders DC United on Friday night may not have healed the wounds of his glaring late miss against the Belgians but it can’t have hurt.
And finally …
The 14-year-old schoolboy who caused Danny Coles to be sacked as Exeter City’s captain and placed on the transfer list has called for an end to their feud. It all began when Will Wenley – a St Peter’s School pupil and season-ticket holder at St James Park – saw a tweet from Coles that said England’s Phil Jagielka was “a car crash waiting to happen” and responded “so like you at Exeter”. This prompted a foul-mouthed tirade from the defender, who told the fan to “fuck off cunt”. Unsurprisingly, Coles was forced to issue a swift apology but not before he was fined two weeks’ wages, stripped of the captaincy and closed down his Twitter account. “It’s time to move on,” Wenley, of Pennsylvania (in Exeter) said magnanimously.
