It may be opening weekend optimism, but the Colombian lifted Carlo Ancelotti’s side to a level that outplayed Tottenham
First weekends are all about hope. Fresh grass and fresh dreams. The new tactics that oppositions haven’t yet worked out, and the new players who haven’t yet been paid for. It’s a weekend for flinging perspective to one side and letting your imagination run riot, a weekend of kings and frauds and nothing in between. Mohamed Salah is back. Fulham are doomed. West Ham are in crisis. VAR is good now. And this is our year, as assuredly as all the others were before them.
Naturally, all this feeds giddily into football’s rapacious content-industrial complex, where things are always being learned, where definitive judgements are eternally being handed down, where phrases like “ominous statement of intent”, “on this admittedly flimsy evidence” and “early days, but…” are thrashed to within an inch of their meaning. Come May, this boundless optimism will inevitably be cannibalised and fed back into the content machine as scornful tweets and hindsight journalism. But then, anybody accusing football fans of getting ahead of themselves is probably guilty of mislaying the entire point of being a football fan in the first place.
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