The coming of May means many things: the start of summer, wet Bank Holidays, Eurovision… But the most importantly it marks the climax of the football season.
League winners are crowned, terrible teams are finally relegated, and the FA Cup, Champions League and Europa League finals are all in sight. It’s the most exciting part of the year, delivering the agony and ecstasy that makes football great. But it’s also somewhat bittersweet, as in the back of your mind you know that there’ll be no proper football for the rest of the summer.
And like any annual event, it had built up its own collection of clichés and traditions, that you know you look forward to every year. Things like this:
Pundits start constantly using the phrase ‘business end of the season’
Pundits love a good meaningless cliché. And following the ‘busy Christmas period’, we enter the ‘business end of the season’, where results really matter. Of course, that winless run your team had in November is the reason you’re not going to make the top four, and a couple of ‘big wins’ in May isn’t going to get those points back
A Championship side finish fifteenth and their fans run on the pitch like they’ve won the league
Every year the useless stewards try to form a useless wall, but still hundreds of fans rush on just in the hope of getting a selfie with Gabriel Obertan.
You start taking a more ‘active’ interest in the Copa America, U21 European championships or random foreign leagues, just so you have something to watch over the summer
If it’s a Word Cup or Euros year, the summer is all good. But if not, that means no proper football until August. So like a pathetic junkie, you start scrambling around for alternatives. Maybe the Copa América is on, and you stay up all night to watch it, and start to become one of those football hipsters who go on about Argentinian left backs. Or maybe there’s an U21 tournament, where you can have fun guessing which hotly-tipped English prospects will be playing in the Championship in a few years time. Or god forbid, you start following the MLS.
You can buy this year’s shirt for only a tenner
But you already spent £55 on that green and orange third kit back in September.
You look at your Fantasy team for the first time since October, and see how badly you’ve done
That group of lads in the office spent a whole week at the end of August picking their team, and you thought you’d join in. ‘I’m actually going to keep up this year’, you told yourself. Every Friday at 4.45pm, with a cheeky beer at your desk, you were going to look at the stats, and do transfers, and keep track of who’s injured, and use your Triple Captain at the perfect moment. But you’d forgotten about it after two weeks, and now you look back and see you’re dead last in the work table, with Riyad Mahrez still languishing as your captain (just like how you had Memphis Depay there for the whole of last season).
The Goal of the Season is announced
And some average winger is guaranteed immortality from a worldie he scored back on a Tuesday night in January.
Televised game that looked really tasty in March are now absolutely meaningless
When Sky were picking the fixtures four months ago, a match between two top sides with one game to go looked like a big deal. But now one of them have Champions League qualification locked down (and no hope of winning the league), and the other has tumbled to mid table. So it looks like we’ve got another boring Sunday afternoon on our hands.
The word ‘safety’ loses all meaning
Is your team ‘safe’ yet? Is 40 points enough to be ‘safe’? Are you just three points from ‘safety’? Does ‘safety’ mean just getting out of the relegation zone, or actually how may points you (theoretically) need to be mathematically ‘safe’?
Someone ‘puts themselves in the shop window’
Your team signed a highly rated young South American a few years back, and despite a decent start and a random hat-trick in a League Cup tie, he generally hasn’t done much. But now he’s out of contract, and he’s still a name, and there’s reportedly interest from someone Chinese or Russian clubs – or if they’re a bit older, wherever Harry Redknapp is managing now – so he suddenly starts turning it on.
A Sam Allardyce team avoids relegation
Some things never change.
You start obsessing over leaks of next season’s football kits
LEAKED: Although not close to anything official yet this could potentially be Utd's 2017/18 home kit. What do you make of the design? #MUFC pic.twitter.com/h3KDFuRfBd
— BusbyBulletin (@BusbyBulletin) May 9, 2017
A low-res image of an Arsenal shirt with Arabic watermarks obscuring most of it must be real, right?
You try to be interested in cricket
LOL, no.
