The Warm-Up: Granit Xhaka comes out swinging
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Updated 01/11/2019 at 09:00 GMT
Arsenal's captain drops some hard truths, Barcelona have a whip-round, and Liverpool think about taking their ball and going home.
Granit Xhaka of Arsenal before the Premier League match between Arsenal FC and Crystal Palace at Emirates Stadium on October 27, 2019 in London, United Kingdom
Image credit: Getty Images
FRIDAY’S BIG STORIES
Granit surfaces
One of the oddest things about Granit Xhaka Tells His Own Fans To Eff Off, After They Tell Him To Eff Off-Gate, was the fact an apology didn’t immediately follow. He wouldn’t have had to mean it, of course; he could have crossed his fingers and muttered “not” straight afterwards. But with things like this there’s a process to go through, a form to be observed.
Instead, we heard about players going to visit him. We heard from Emiliano Martinez, praising “a lovely guy” and a “leader”. It wasn’t until late on Thursday that we heard from the man himself.
It’s distinctly and obviously not quite an apology; “sorry” only appears in passing. As he says, it’s an explanation, and to the Warm-Up’s eyes it’s a pretty reasonable one. There’s only so much being told to repeatedly Eff Off a person can take.
It’s particularly interesting that Xhaka refuses to separate “comments at matches and on social media”. It is easy to assume that the toxicity of social media is in some way siloed off from the matchday experience. That online abuse may be plentiful but it is also cheap, disposable, and somehow not real, as opposed to the in-stadium abuse: heartfelt, authentic, and of course paid for.
Here, Xhaka reminds us that this feels, at least to him, like a broad continuum; that being told to Eff Off by @69Mesutology420 and being told to Eff Off by row 47, seat 29 doesn't feel so different, regardless of the fact that the former is a bored teenager killing time between games of whatever it is kids play these days, on their Xboxes, and the latter has been to every game since the move from Woolwich.
Frankly, it’s a little jarring to hear a footballer put it so plainly. That thousands of people shouting at you twice a week, and thousands of people tweeting at you all the rest of the time, can pile up. That perhaps this isn’t okay. And that perhaps responding to this — however unprofessionally, however disrespectfully — isn’t something that requires an abject performance-apology.
There is power in saying: this is what happened, this is why it happened, and there it is. Well in, Granit.
Passing the cap at Camp Nou
Remember Neymar? Cracking footballer, falls over a lot, left Barcelona to win the Champions League with PSG, didn’t. Spent all summer trying to move to Spain, couldn’t. Injured a lot.
As he nurses his latest hamstring inconvenience, and as PSG settle into their usual place at the top of Ligue 1, he can at least take some comfort that his former teammates at Barcelona were pretty keen to see him return. According to Gerard Piqué, they even looked into tweaking their own arrangements to help with the financial side of things.
We were ready to adjust our contracts. We weren’t going to contribute money, but we were going to make things easier by allowing some payments to be made in the second or third year instead of the first.
Isn’t that sweet of them? Hold that giant bag of money until after Christmas, friends, and bring the prodigal son home.
But it wasn’t to be, and so Neymar had to stay and try to find some limelight alongside the Kylian Mbappe Experience. Hopefully he returns to fitness in the New Year. At his best, he’s a joy to watch, and it would be a shame for him to miss another humiliating collapse in the Champions League.
[extremely Pixies voice] Carabaoooooooooooo
The morning after the night before: a Carabao Cup draw! At 8.50 am on a Thursday! For some reason!
Colchester United got the plummiest tie, a trip to Old Trafford and, given the way this season is going, a decent shot at a result as well. Oxford United will host the latest episode of All or Nothing: Phil Foden, and Leicester are off to Everton. Just what Marco Silva’s shattered nerves were after: a night in with Jamie Vardy.
Liverpool, meanwhile, will be going to Aston Villa. Or will they?
Last season’s Champions League win means that Liverpool are due in Qatar to play in the Club World Cup on 18 December, with another game on the 21st. But the League Cup quarter-finals are due to be played that same week, and Liverpool don’t have any other free mid-week slots until after the League Cup semis are scheduled, in January, and oh God there’s just So. Much. Football.
We’d bet on some kind of compromise being hammered out: two games played in parallel, perhaps; one by the first team and one by a squad of kids, subs, and Nathaniel Clyne. But a flounce would be much more interesting: What happens then? Send a battered Arsenal back into the fray? Wave Villa through with a nod and a smile?
Or, perhaps, just roll the whole competition up and call it a day. It had a good run, the League Cup, but there’s just no competing with FIFA’s vanity tournaments.
IN OTHER NEWS
We present the lowest-effort Hallowe’en social media post in the history of the medium, courtesy of West Ham. They’ve not even bothered to get poor Sebastien Haller a mask …
… unless they’re trying to say that there is no soul more cursed, more miserable, more doomed to suffer under an uncaring and empty sky, than whichever poor sod is playing up front for West Ham. In which case, nice costume. Nailed it.
RETRO CORNER
In keeping with our theme of Arsenal captains saying unwise things, let’s go back to 1989, and this notorious experiment in placing a microphone on a referee. Somebody forgot to let Arsenal’s players know that David Elleray was hot, hot, hot. It went about as well as you might expect.
Do you think referees sit around drinking from tea-cups after games these days? The Warm-Up suspects not. Oh, the things we’ve lost.
HAT TIP
Over on the Athletic (£), Andy Mitten has been to see Roma’s Chris Smalling, who is doing pretty well in Italy and seems pretty happy. And good for him. Always seemed a fundamentally pleasant bloke.
The fans are crazy here, the stadium is very noisy, especially the ultras. People come up to me in the street and say “Forza Roma” all the time. Someone came to the training ground and presented me with a picture they’d drawn of my son Leo. You feel the love and that makes you more confident.
COMING UP
Barnsley host Bristol City in The Championship, Paderborn visit Hoffenheim in the Bundesliga, and there’s a sprinkling of La Liga 2 games, including runaway leaders Cádiz at home to Sporting Gijón.
And with that, the weekend. Have a lovely one.
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