EPL TALK: Savour this mad, unpredictable season like no other

JOHN Cleese and Ted Lasso are usually wheeled out towards the end of the season, to regurgitate that old chestnut about hope and despair. In sport, as in life, it’s the hope that kills us, apparently.

Cleese said it first in a forgotten movie called "Clockwise", about a stressed professional who cannot get to the right place at the right time, the scenes of which were repeated whenever Manchester City’s John Stones tried to track Newcastle United’s forward line.

Lasso’s more recent line reading is the more famous one. He’s the comedic manager with a funny accent who says the strangest things as he seeks to prove he’s just one of the lads in a baseball cap. "Ted Lasso" feels like a documentary at Chelsea.

But they’re wrong. It’s not really the hope. It’s the despair, the chaos, the circus-like freakery of a weird performance that keeps most of us coming back for the latest display of the failings of the human condition.

Admittedly, it’s not quite all of us. There are a handful of supporters from Manchester City, sometimes Liverpool and Chelsea, previously Manchester United and always Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga that are blissfully addicted to hope. Hope is a natural state of being for the big boys, an entitled way of life.

Everyone else can only mutter something about avoiding relegation, enjoying a decent cup run and pondering the rare possibility of qualifying for a European competition that the elite typically view as something left on a shoe by a stray dog with an irritable bowel.

After that, it's the pursuit of unhappiness, usually other clubs’ unhappiness.

Americans speak of the pursuit of happiness, which is why their sports are never crammed into 90 minutes on a wet weekend in Leeds. Chelsea have just returned from Leeds, looking like haunted escapees from Devil’s Island. Wasn’t the incongruity of it all just fabulous?

Leeds are managed by a man who sounds like Ted Lasso. Jesse Marsch is American and occasionally refers to the sport as "soccer", which might still be a hanging offence in Yorkshire. And yet, his underdogs knocked three past Chelsea’s dandies. It was glorious.

In response, Thomas Tuchel gave the impression that he might actually self-combust, grinning like Hannibal Lecter eyeing another supper victim before dramatically exploding across the press conference.

Rather than praise Leeds for their triumph, he blamed the transport chaos. The Chelsea staff had to travel to the game on a bus – not the players, you understand, who went ahead on a plane – just the club’s coaches. Apparently, Édouard Mendy’s dozy dribble was the fault of the physio not flying first class, rather than Tuchel’s insistence on playing out from the back.

Suddenly, Chelsea looked a bit rubbish, unable to score and unable to stop Leeds from scoring, a lovely technicolour production of incompetence that always goes down well, particularly when it’s a troupe of A-listers floundering like a kids’ drama group singing in front of kiasu parents.

We need this. The English Premier League needs this. As a viral clip from an unfiltered Ian Wright reiterated this week, a one-horse race with no surprise or competition is s*** and this season is so far proving to be anything but – as the unnerved elite try to laugh off the idea that the peasantry might be considering a raid on the silverware.

Not that Newcastle United are peasants of course, unless the definition of a peasant is "a simple labourer of low social status suddenly handed the oil riches of an entire nation". In the sportswashing derby between the Magpies and Manchester City, the spoils were shared, leaving a jittery Pep Guardiola to go overboard in his praise.

Newcastle manager Eddie Howe was “top class”. The Newcastle players’ pace, quality and aggression were top class. The kitmen were also presumably top class, along with the meat pie sellers and the music selections of the stadium DJ.

Guardiola preferred to focus on the soaring Magpies, rather than John Stones having the look of a new maths student trying to work out a really complicated equation whenever Allan Saint-Maximin wandered by.

Naturally, the euphoric Magpies were all about the rapid improvement of a team funded by a regime that had just sentenced Leeds student Salma al-Shehab to 34 years in jail for supporting activists on Twitter.

Inconsistency amid top clubs means a welcome unpredictability

But that’s the largely unspoken, wrong kind of despair that hangs over the EPL, so let’s return to the benign kind in North London.

Arsenal have stopped being funny. When did that happen?

Manager Mikel Arteta put his team and “winning mentality” in the same sentence and no one laughed.

Instead the Gunners top the table. Three games, three wins and a couple of superstars in the making. Striker Gabriel Jesus played a key role in two goals against Bournemouth. Defender William Saliba scored a stunning third. At different ends of the pitch and at very different stages of their career, Jesus and Saliba are making the Gunners look assured, resolute and decisive, qualities not really associated with the club since Patrick Vieira stopped bullying Gary Neville.

Meanwhile, Manchester United and Liverpool are playing out a six-pointer among the minnows and West Ham United – tipped for Europe – are without a point, a goal and a prayer at the moment. All they have is a large dose of despair, the one, true elixir of EPL life.

No one can predict the weekly fixtures right now, let alone a title race between contenders currently showing the consistency of jelly and custard. Indeed, if there were a couple of players called Jelly and Custard, Manchester United would probably sign them, such is the calamitous state of affairs among imperilled giants.

There are flaws aplenty, too many managers trying to impose regular playing patterns upon irregular players and too many smaller clubs outsmarting those with bigger budgets.

And long may it continue because the alternative has already been outlined by Ian Wright. It’s crap. Predictable. Elitist and entitled, where hope belongs only to a select few.

Thankfully, they’re nearly all wallowing in the messy stuff now, all despairing about some perceived injustice or wary of where to go from here, unsure of what happens next.

But we don’t want to know. We should want messy and uneven and erratic. We should want to keep guessing, to the chaotic end if possible. Uncertainty is exciting. Embrace it.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 26 books.

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