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Defeat for either Manchester United or Tottenham will spark inevitable crisis narrative


When Tottenham and Manchester United meet later today there will be more than simply three points at stake. This is a fixture of growing significance. For both sides victory would calm the turbulence around them, while a draw would momentarily still fractious waters. But defeat would be seismic.

Should Tottenham go down, this will be cast as the consequence ofthe accelerated speed with which a Jose Mourinho meltdown happens these days; evidence that he no longer bothers to acquire a few bits of silverware first before heading straight to the toxic end game of blame and counter-blame that has long pockmarked his career. Never mind that Spurs have a League Cup final looming, any post-defeat discussion would centre on speculation of how long he can last. Lose on Sunday and the amateur soothsayers of the internet will be insisting the end is surely nigh.

And if United were to lose, the fallout would not be much less fraught. Sure,the team are still in Europe and comfortably ensconced in the Champions League qualification places, but the response from many of the club's claimed one billion fans across the world is unlikely to be temperate.

On social media the players will be vilified-if they are black, likely racially abused too, sadly. The fact that the opposition are managed by a former United boss who actually won a couple of trophies will be used as a stick to beat the current silverware-free man in charge. This will not be regarded as the inevitable consequence of a wearying midweek European fixture, it will be reckoned confirmation of a wider decline, of structural inadequacy, of the manager’s shortcomings.

In short for both clubs defeat will not be cast as one of those things. It will be the start of a crisis.

Every football season the narrative arc insists on the lurch from crisis to crisis. A club will become the focus of attention for its wayward form and will remain in the eye of the storm until either results improve or the manager is fired. But this season the swing into calamity seems to be far more frequent and to afflict a far wider span of clubs. This season fluctuations in form have everywhere been greeted with panicked assumptions of impending disaster.

And there is not a team in the Premier League that has remained untouched by the whiff of crisis. Even Manchester City-currently in hot, if unacknowledged, pursuit of a quadruple-have been thus tainted. While the responsible view of their slow start back in August was that the team were suffering from the lack of a proper close season, the urge for crisis insisted this was no mere blip. Manchester United too were not reckoned to be stumbling from a curtailed preparation when they lost to Spurs 6-1 on October 4th: this was the harbinger of total disaster. Or at least it was until they beat Paris St Germain in the Champions League in their next game on 17 October.

Arsenal’s first crisis of the season began with a 3-0 loss to Aston Villa on 8 November, which continued and grew across six losses and two draws in the Premier League before a 3-1 win over Chelsea on Boxing Day quietened the panic. Which quickly reappeared in April after a 3-0 loss to Liverpool and 1-1 draw with Slavia Prague. Liverpool’s time in the crisis zone, meanwhile, stretched from a 1-0 loss to Brighton on 3 February through a run of six defeats in seven league games through to 15 March. Spurs booked their place on the rollercoaster on 21 February with defeat to West Ham. Six losses in eight since kept the issue simmering until the defeat to Dinamo Zagreb brought it to the boil.As for Newcastle United, well the less said about their insistent flirtation with jeopardy the better.

The reason for the growing infatuation with calamity is clear. With fans unable to attend games in person, their principal avenue for expression of concern is social media. When watching their team stumble on television with their phone winking beside them, temperance is not a quality much in evidence. If their team is not five up within ten minutes, they are quick to dismay and condemn. And mainstream media feeds from the ensuing frenzy. In the past the easiest way to judge the downbeat mood of a club’s followers was to eavesdrop in a full-or rather rapidly emptying-stadium. Now the only access to opinion is social media, where the loudest gain the most attention. It has produced previously unrecorded levels of fevered assumption of extremity.

But the interesting thing about this season of apparent unyielding crisis is that it has not been reflected in the most immediate way: the managerial sack race. So far there have only been three departures in the Premier League: Slaven Bilic, Chris Wilder and Frank Lampard. Given the first two were from clubs rooted to the foot of the table and the other was from Chelsea it would be hard to suggest anything unusual in that. Last season, on the other hand, a third of Premier League clubs changed managers, while Watford managed to evict no fewer than three from the Vicarage Road technical area.

Which suggests club chairmen react more to vocal disparagement in the stadium (Everton, West Ham, Arsenal, Tottenham and Watford-twice-all dispensed with managers while fans were still in attendance last season) than they do to online noise. Indeed, I have spoken to a couple of managers who reckon that they have benefitted from the lack of fans during a dip in form: it has not given the chairman ideas.

Which means were Spurs to lose to United on Sunday, Mourinho will be hoping his boss Daniel Levy, as he watches on in an empty Tottenham Stadium, continues to remain aloof from Twitter, Instagram and the BBC football website.


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