Reading Matt Stead’s lament for the demise of the good old-fashioned manager sacking this season made us realise two things. First, just how many people got to have a go at being a Premier League manager last season (40), and also that last season is approximately 427 years ago.
Our entire perception of the passage of time has, we can only conclude, been completely screwed up by the mid-season World Cup. Our brain can no longer process that this was an event that took place in November and December, because this is simply not when World Cups occur.
And it means that absolutely everything from the 2022/23 World Cup before Qatar now has a kind of sepia quality in our brain and should be the subject of a talking heads show where some comedians pretend to remember it.
If you don’t believe us, then consider the fact that these five things all happened last season.
Bruno Lage was Wolves manager
This was the ‘Remember the 90s’ one that started us down this path. No way this happened, is there? No possible way Bruno Lage was Wolves manager last season. He was the replacement for Nuno! Who left ages ago! And he was only in the job five minutes!
Apparently – according to the so-called internet anyway – Bruno Lage was also manager for over 50 Wolves matches, another absurd lie.
Brentford went 4-0 up in 35 minutes against Manchester United
Cristiano Ronaldo started up front, with Jadon Sancho on the right wing and Fred in the middle of the park. Donny van de Beek made an appearance off the bench. Brentford scored four goals pretty much straight away, with David De Gea having an absolute stinker, and if you think you remember this game as being pretty recent then tell us who scored all those goals, clever clogs? Wrong, Ivan Toney got precisely none of those goals.
You want further confirmation this game happened not just absolutely ages ago but also surely outside the wider Barclays Cinematic Universe altogether? With things not going his way, Bruno Fernandes picked up a needless late booking for whining at the referee. The world has changed so, so much. We are unmoored.
Nathan Jones rocked our world all too briefly
We can all get predictions wrong, can’t we? Here at F365, we’ve even turned it into an annual punishment ritual where we all get the chance to say things like ‘Don’t think Erling Haaland is really a Guardiola player’ or ‘Mason Mount is the final piece in the Manchester United puzzle’ so that we can look like absolute tw*ts 10 months later. But about 27 years ago when Nathan Jones was named Southampton manager, we were absolutely certain the Barclays had a new main character. In our defence, this was mainly because of his tendency to say absolutely batsh*t things rather than, you know, like football results and stuff.
But we hoped and thought the results would be decent enough to keep him around the place for longer than a handful of games that left him as nothing more than a riotously entertaining yet ultimately minor character. A Lord Flashheart, if you will. A Ralphie Cifaretto. Great, sure, but would it have hurt to let us see a bit more of them?
Did stop City winning the Quadruple, which is a great bit of writing to be fair. You’ve got to let someone this fun make one significant impact on the main narrative arc even if they are only going to be a minor character in the grand scheme. The sad thing is that bringing Jones to the Barclays came at such great cost, leaving his former club Luton in the lurch as it did. It’s only now, several years but somehow only one season later, that the Hatters have truly recovered.
Steven Gerrard v Frank Lampard
Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, you remember. Couldn’t play together for England. But did, about a million times. Great players, sh*te managers. But they met as managers in the Premier League last season. Steven Gerrard’s Aston Villa beat Frank Lampard’s Everton 2-1 and, while it was far, far too early in the season for this to really be a six-pointer, it certainly felt like it might be an important result in the relegation battle to come. Which was in the end only 50 per cent true.
When the season finally ended about 36 months later, Everton secured survival only on the very final day under Sean Dyche but Unai Emery’s Aston Villa qualified for Europe despite this game being their only win back in the first six games of the season, when cheeseburgers were a penny and the internet was in black and white.
Antonio Conte and Thomas Tuchel shook hands
At the end of an unremarkable 2-2 draw between Chelsea and Tottenham, a pair of elite managers with winning mentalities simply shook hands and carried on with their good works in steering these two fine clubs ever onward to further success. Oh, wait, no, I’m hearing they did the most pitiful aggressively alpha handshake ever and then both set about shatting their collective beds.
It’s not a new observation to note just how long ago this event feels, but it still feels necessary. It was only 18 months ago. We can’t accept that some of the other stuff here happened last season, but we struggle with the idea of this one being this decade.
Is it just us? Does this not feel like it happened in the before times to everyone else? Just trying to even imagine Chelsea spending loads of money only to find themselves languishing in mid-table is quite simply impossible. It’s from another age. The footage should be in wobbly SD accompanied by hollering and witless FanZone commentary.
We’re pretty sure when this handshake happened that there was still a car park behind one of the Stamford Bridge goals. And yet we’re supposed to accept it was last season? Something not right’s going on here.
