Two key themes emerged in the opening week of the Euros. The return of the screamer. And England being terrible.
The job now is to investigate if these two trends are somehow related. Many of you will remember a time when every good goal was a screamer. You might rent a 501 Great Goals VHS (Ask Paul Rouse, kids, he’s the history prof) and find about 460 of them to be screamers, thumped in from long distance by everyone from John Harkes to Jeremy Goss.
The rest would be any old middling goal the producer could find to fill up the quota and go home. Admit it, you went off the screamer. As Gilesy would probably put it, if everything is a screamer, nothing is a screamer.
People got sniffy about the screamer and wanted ‘a good team goal’ to win Goal of the Month on Match of the Day. They got bored. Only enjoyed screamers that crashed in off the crossbar on the volley, or got lodged in the angle of a stanchion.
People now only remember the dribbly goals from those days, your Dalian Atkinsons and your Roy Wegerles. In the end, there had been quantitative easing of the screamer and it became devalued. Going into these Euros, the screamer had long been engineered into near extinction.
The stats crowd, the Expected Goals lads, have largely got the blame. And Pep. When Man City set the 100-point record in 2018, they didn’t score a goal from outside the box before Christmas.
Maybe it has all been just another land grab by the management class. A further shift away from individual.
