Monday is the first day of the long-awaited hearing into Manchester City’s 115 charges. “The [other] Premier League teams want us to be sanctioned, that is for sure,” Pep Guardiola admitted last Friday. With Erling Haaland having personally outscored every other team in the league over the first four matches, the prospects for City’s rivals already look dim without judicial intervention.
So this early-season north London derby felt unusually pressurised. Arsenal, who dropped points they couldn’t afford to lose two weeks ago against Brighton, had to find a way to win without their two best midfield players. Tottenham had to shake off the mediocrity of a start that has picked up where they left off last season, rather than recreating the excitement of Ange Postecoglou’s first 10 games in charge.
Postecoglou, who has made so much of his commitment to attack, went with what looked on paper a rather brave 4-1-5 formation, featuring an Ossie Ardiles-style front five and Rodrigo Bentancur as the sole central midfielder.
The match, though, was not as exciting as Spurs’s line-up had promised. As both sides failed to penetrate with a series of dull possession attacks, the mind began to drift . . . maybe the spectacle could be improved by the addition of a couple of maverick Barclaysmen . . .
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Originally the invention of the Cultras football podcast, the superviral #barclaysmen trend celebrates the good, but not that good, but still fondly remembered players of yesteryear, if yesteryear is defined as “the time when people currently in their 20s and early 30s were watching football as kids”.
The nostalgic sweet spot seemed to be the years around 2007-11. The stars of that era were players such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Robin van Persie, but the Barclaysmen were the likes of Yakubu Aiyegbeni, Morten Gamst Pedersen, Michu, Hugo Rodallega and Matty Taylor. Barclaysmen could be players with “maverick” personalities such as Jimmy Bullard, or those with extreme characteristics, like Rory Delap. They had their coaching counterparts in people such as Sam Allardyce, Tony Pulis and Phil Brown.
As everyone knows, the Premier League has changed radically since those days, sadly for countries such as Ireland, who would be better off if the Barclaysmen era had never ended. You could scan almost in vain the Tottenham and Arsenal teamsheets in search of players who could qualify as potential Barclaysmen.
There were few obvious candidates in a disgustingly accomplished Arsenal team. Kai Havertz? Maybe one day, if he completes his time in the Premier League without ever having decisively settled the question of whether he really is all that good.
For Spurs, Christian Romero has the personality for it but he has also won the World Cup, so no. James Maddison’s quote about wanting to be the main man at his family’s roast was an unmistakeable flash of Barclaysman, suggesting he could be the Bullard or the David Bentley of our time ... but realistically he is still too good to be compared to those players.
This pleasant reverie was disturbed by the best chance of the half suddenly falling to Dominic Solanke after Son Heung-min deflected the ball towards him. Solanke’s first touch was bad, forcing him to take a second touch which wasn’t much better, leaving him with no option but to cut back rather than shoot with his third touch, at which point he got tackled by William Saliba.
Tottenham getting £100 million for Harry Kane seemed like a lot of money until they spent £60 million on Solanke. You realised that Spurs gangling new centre-forward might be the closest thing to a proper Barclaysman involved in this match, though that is not what most Spurs fans were hoping for when they broke their incoming transfer record to sign him from Bournemouth.
There was a minor flashpoint when Jurriën Timber’s foot rolled over the top of the ball and scraped down Pedro Porro’s ankle, but the ensuing confrontation between the teams was tame. In the past a player such as Luis Suarez might have taken advantage of the confusion to tweak nipples and pull hair, but today’s players know that chaos is no smokescreen in the age of VAR.
Rather incredibly, there were seven yellow cards by half-time – the joint-highest total ever for a Premier League first half. Yet there had been hardly any violence. Yet another occasion for a spasm of “look-what-they-have-taken-from-us” nostalgia.
It was only in the second half that we realised maybe the real Barclaysman had been staring us in the face all along.
Mikel Arteta’s time working with Guardiola has perhaps led to him being too easily pigeonholed as a Guardiola-school coach. Yet this is also a man who spent the peak Barclays era playing in central midfield for David Moyes’s Everton.
Now his team were repelling Tottenham’s weedy ballplayers with a Pulis-style back four consisting of four big strong centre-halves. Arsenal were ceding possession and playing on the break, and Bukayo Saka was annoying the Spurs crowd by very deliberately taking as much time as possible over every corner.
In the end it felt inevitable that Arsenal’s winner would come from one of those Saka corners, thumped high into Tottenham’s net by the forehead of Gabriel Magalhaes.
[ Barney Ronay: Arsenal’s mania for detail sets them apart from SpursOpens in new window ]
“For some reason, people think I don’t care about set pieces, it’s a narrative you can keep going for ages and ages,” Postecoglou said afterwards, apparently forgetting that he had started this narrative last season by saying he didn’t believe in set-piece coaches while simultaneously having one of the worst set-piece records in the league.
There was still half an hour left to play when Gabriel scored, but Tottenham made it feel like a lot less. All the while Gabriel booted clearance after clearance downfield with obvious relish. As the final whistle went Arteta celebrated with his coaches and somewhere out there Pulis was wiping a tear from his eye. If this was not classic Barclays, then the phrase has no meaning.
