And now, the end is near.
The coming of May means many things: the start of summer, wet Bank Holidays, Eurovision… But most importantly it marks the climax of the football season. League winners are crowned, teams are relegated, and the FA Cup, Champions League and Europa League finals are all in sight.
It’s both the most exciting part of the year, delivering the real agony and ecstasy that makes football great, but 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 no streak in May is going to get those points back.
A Championship side finish 15th and their fans run on the pitch like they’ve won the league
Every year the PA warns people it is an offence to enter the field of play, and every year the stewards hopelessly form a useless human 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 Copa America, Under-21 European championships or the MLS or other random foreign leagues, just so you have something to watch over the summer
If it’s a World 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 seeking out 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 Chilean left backs.
Or maybe there’s an U21 tournament, where you can have fun guessing which English hot prospects will eventually be playing in the Championship in a few years. Or god forbid, you start following the MLS.
You can buy this year’s shirt for only a tenner
But you already spent €60 on that green and orange third kit 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 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 Memphis Depay did for the whole of last year).
The Goal of the Season is announced
And some average winger is guaranteed immortality for 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, with no hope of winning the league, and the other has tumbled to mid table, and 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 there’s reportedly interest from some Chinese or Russian clubs – or if they’re winding up their career, 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 check in on your local Airtricity League team
God bless summer football.
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