it means nothing…

Tempting as it is to jump on Newcastle’s 6-1 defeat to Leyton Orient as yet another sign that the club from Tyneside is sinking faster than the Titanic, I think to do so would be entirely misguided. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I feel that Newcastle have a lot of work to do to halt their downward spiral with the club still not selling and no real certainty over who the manager will be for the forthcoming season. No, what I mean is that pre-season games are essentially, meaningless, and people place far too much emphasis on them for my liking.

Of course they serve their purpose, getting players back fit and up to match speed is an essential part of pre-season, and bedding new signings into the way the team plays is crucial too. But in recent years especially the media has placed far too much emphasis on the results of pre-season games – all it takes is a slip up against an unknown Asian team or American side and suddenly someones title challenge is out of the window. The thing is though, while football is a results business, pre-season results mean absolutely nothing.

Of course, every fan would love to see their team glide through pre-season, dispatching of every team put in front of them and hitting the competitive season in high spirits. Likewise, no one wants to log onto their clubs official website to find that they’ve lost to a team they’ve never heard of, and Newcastle fans will doubtless be a touch concerned that a side full of supposedly Premier League quality players got such a beating from a League One team.

But at the end of the day, pre-season will always throw up some unexpected results, and you should read absolutely nothing into them. For a start, many teams will fill their touring squad with young players on the fringe of the first team and use their games as an opportunity to blood them at a higher level. As a result the team isn’t as good in terms of ability while the senior pros and the young pretenders also have to forge an on-pitch understanding almost straight away, which is hard work.

Even when a team plays what is something akin to a full strength side though (as Newcastle reportedly did against Orient – I haven’t done my research), there is no way that the game and the result will be representative of the forthcoming season. The players will all be underdone for the most part in terms of fitness, and usually end up playing in climates that are foreign to them. You try training everyday in Liverpool or Manchester then jetting off to America or Africa. It’s hard bloody work playing in such unfamiliar climes.

The crux though, is in the name: ‘pre-season friendly’. While many games may not actually seem very friendly, you are unlikely to see full blooded tackles flying in left right and centre, players will rarely run themselves into the ground and even Wayne Rooney is unlikely to become riled enough to try and execute a referee by throwing the ball at him before assaulting the corner flag. At the end of the day, the players won’t exactly be taking it easy, but they’re not busting any guts either.

And the thing is, it is the element of competition that makes football. It’s a hugely high pressure sport, especially at the top level, because so much depends on the outcome of every game, of every move, of every pass. Even at the start of a season one game could make or break success or relegation for any side. It is this pressure, the overwhelming need to do everything perfectly that makes football what it is and that makes players play to their best.

Professional footballers are generally people who thrive under pressure, who will be spurred on by that sense of adversity to overcome the opposition no matter what the obstacles. Pre-season friendlies come with precisely none of these pressures. There is nothing resting on the game apart from maybe showing that you’re fitter than a squad rival or for youngsters to forge a place for themselves in the back of their manager’s head.

So no matter who your team is playing in a friendly game, whether it is AC Milan or Adelaide United, you can never expect to see your players playing to their full potential. Even if they went out their determined to give it their all, they wouldn’t play to the same level as they do in competitive games because that drive isn’t there, the absolute pressure to perform is absent, and so the motivation just isn’t the same.

Which is why I get very frustrated when the media jumps on pre-season results and uses them to predict the fortunes of a side for the upcoming season. Newcastle lost to Orient, but they could do very well in the Championship nonetheless, because when the pressure is on, the players should respond. Likewise Liverpool slipped up in Asia, but that doesn’t mean (unfortunately) that they’ll be relegation candidates. And, with the boot on the other foot, the fact that Michael Owen has scored a few no-pressure goals for United doesn’t mean that he’ll be banging them in in the pressure cooker that is the Premier League.

I know pre-season can be a very frustrating time when you’re a football fan. Those of us who live and breathe the game are left with little more than nonsense tabloid rumours and meaningless friendly results to chew over, and while I can understand that you have to make the most of what you can get, it really grinds my gears to see media hacks placing so much importance on these minor details.

At the end of the day, everything up until the first ball of the season is kicked is pure speculation. A team can look great on paper and then have a shocking season (see Spurs last season) or be sure-fire contenders for relegation and then stun everyone with their performances (see Hull last season). Of course, even once things are underway you can never be sure of anything, with changes in fortune possible at any and every juncture (see Spurs and Hull last season).

Ultimately, it is this pure unpredictability of football that makes it so brilliant. Real Madrid have arguably the best collection of players on the planet now, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be any good. They can go either way and that pure possibility means that it will be an exciting season. So no matter what your team gets up to in their pre-season friendlies and no matter who you do or do not sign, never fear. In football, as Adidas rightly point out, impossible is nothing.

Of course, Newcastle fans will find those words less comforting than most given the perilous position of their club, not to mention the fact that Adidas served them up an impossibly nasty kit for this season. Still, don’t bet against them defying all the odds and storming back to the Premier League this season, in which case that awful yellow kit could go down as a cult classic in the minds of their supporters, which really would prove that nothing is impossible.

Like this? Plenty more where that came from at They Think It’s All Over…

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