The Football Notebook: Arsenal’s Still the Team to Beat, NFL Preseason Stinks and OBJ Is Home
Plus: Ty Simpson catches my eye, Sevilla makes me look stupid and I fall in love with a random EFL Championship game.
Welcome to The Football Notebook, a new weekly column that will serve as a home for all of the thoughts that accumulate in my brain over the course of a weekend spent watching entirely too much football.
Some weeks, that will mean writing about the biggest games from the weekend and attempting to make sense of what they mean for the season ahead. Other times, it might be a piece of news that I can’t stop thinking about, a player who caught my attention for reasons good or bad, a random game between two small-time teams that makes my head explode, or something that has almost nothing to do with what happened on the field at all. There will probably be serious analysis mixed in with half-baked theories, unnecessary observations and whatever other nonsense happens to enter my mind while bouncing between college football, the NFL and soccer for three straight days.
That’s really the big idea behind this whole thing. There are going to be plenty of places around The Football Corner — such as the podcasts After Saturday, After Sunday and The Matchbook — for more structured analysis, rankings, previews and reactions, but The Football Notebook is where I want to empty out my brain every Monday morning and share the things that stuck with me from the weekend, regardless of how important they actually are. Think of it as an entry point into the slightly wacky way my brain processes football and life, where Arsenal winning the FA Community Shield can occupy the same amount of mental real estate as a random EFL Championship game I decided to watch Saturday morning or Odell Beckham Jr. catching two passes in an NFL preseason game.
Basically, if I spent any amount of time thinking about it over the weekend, there’s a chance it’ll end up here.
So, with that explanation out of the way, let’s open the notebook for the first time.
Arsenal is Still the Team to Beat in England
Listen, it’s just the FA Community Shield — an annual charity match played between the winners of last season’s Premier League and FA Cup — and it’s also the first competitive game either Arsenal or Manchester City has played since last May. As such, drawing any sweeping conclusions about what either of these teams will look like over the next nine months based on one game in the middle of August played in Wales would be stupid and not at all a smart move on my part.
That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important, though.
Arsenal, which just came off a Premier League title-winning season for the first time in over two decades, is still — at least to me — the team to beat in England this season (more on that in tomorrow’s inaugural Corner Poll), and Sunday’s 3-0 win over Manchester United did absolutely nothing to change my mind. If anything, it reinforced the idea that the power structure in English football hasn’t really changed just yet, even if we obviously won’t know whether that remains true until much later in the year.
