Yes, the New York Times brings us some research showing that game-by-game, if you only counted the goals by English players, Liverpool would have cruised to the title by nine points over Southampton and 16 over Manchester United. I actually would have guessed at the result before reading, as Steven Gerrard, Daniel Sturridge, Glen Johnson, Raheem Sterling and Jordan Henderson give Liverpool a strong English contingent.
As for Manchester City, the actual champions, they would have been relegated with a record of one win against eight losses and 29 draws.
The whole exercise is pretty silly. For starters, it only accounts for goals scored, not goals stopped. As leaky as Liverpool's defense was, it would have been even worse without Simon Mignolet (a Belgian) in goal and central defenders Kolo Toure (Ivory Coast), Daniel Agger (Denmark), Mamadou Sakho (France) and Martin Skrtel (Slovakia), although I'm not sure how Skrtel's four own-goals would count on the ledger.
But more importantly, and seriously, it's just pointless. It would be like someone saying baseball is America's National Pastime so let's see who won the World Series by counting statistics garnered by Americans (although that would mean no David Ortiz or Koji Uehara, so maybe that's not such a bad idea).
The timing of posting the standings if only English goals count is fortuitous, though, in that it's not only the day after the Premier League season ends, but also the day the English World Cup roster was announced. From what I understand, the lack of English players in the Premier League and its international impact is a source of much hand-wringing, with various attempts to figure out how to make things better.
However, as The Secret Footballer pointed out, the Premier League is a business, and a highly successful one, based on getting the best players from around the world.
"That flagship policy (reaching the semifinals of Euro 2020 and winning the 2022 World Cup) is undermined by a multibillion-pound elephant at the other end of the table. It’s called the Premier League and it doesn’t care if England never win the World Cup again."So there's no need to fantasize about what the standings would look like in a Premier League of only English players; it's not going to happen.
Plus, it's not like England's international record isn't all that stellar when most of the players in its top league were English. There's a reason why 1966 is a magical year there.
No comments:
Post a Comment