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Late Thursday evening the January transfer window slammed shut. It did not simply close, itself an impossibility due to there not actually being a real window involved at all but rather a fanciful, figurative construct. It slammed, dramatically.
And when it did it brought to an end a gripping, momentous and elongated day where the highlight amidst the fireworks and screaming hoopla was the revelation that a 38-year-old who you sort of thought still played for a Premier League club had signed for a short while for a Premier League club. There he will make occasional twenty-minute cameos until May.
Peter Crouch’s switch to Burnley was described across the media as a ‘no-brainer’. Andy Townsend said it. Stephen Warnock said it. This is strange given that a good number of Clarets fans were genuinely despondent at seeing Turf Moor favourite Sam Vokes head in the opposite direction but it shouldn’t be forgotten that this is transfer deadline day and for this very special occasion – as with many occasions – supporters’ feelings don’t matter a jot.
We are ‘there’ merely as an audience; to act as background colour and nothing more. At best we are reduced to tweets that agree with the narrative that this is the greatest, entirely upbeat and most wonderful day in the footballing calendar. Our Christmas if you like. We are expected to whoop and rejoice and bizarrely this year wear yellow because a television presenter dons a yellow tie when he presents a television programme. He is portrayed as transfer deadline day’s Santa Claus. Most of us can’t stand him.
In essence we are viewed as those fake fans you see on pizza commercials during major tournaments, the group of Friends-wannabes who huddle on a single leather sofa in a loft conversion and cheer with their perfect teeth at a free-kick being awarded. They cheer in the most anodyne fashion imaginable yet still it’s enough to send a table of snacks flying through the air in slow motion.
That’s who we are to Sky. Props to prop up the illusion.
For the record, this past month has heralded some fairly interesting moves. Michy Batshuayi’s loan spell at Crystal Palace offers intrigue, as too does Denis Suarez’s temporarily secondment to Arsenal. In a shocking development Newcastle signed two players and even if Danny Mills hasn’t heard of Paraguayan playmaker Miguel Almiron, he is of the ilk and calibre that Rafa Benitez has long coveted. Perhaps though the most noteworthy union is Youri Tielemans to Leicester. The 21-year-old midfielder has been arguably Monaco’s only bright spark this season so his loan deal confounds.
Fulham meanwhile have taken the unusual approach of pretending their current plight isn’t really happening by going back in time to sign Ryan Babel and Lazar Markovic. When the duo were reasonably good Fulham were reasonably good. That seems to be the equation.
Throw in Gonzalo Higuain to Chelsea and for once we have a fairly interesting assortment of transfers over the course of a month but of course deadline day itself was ultimately underwhelming. That’s because it always is and perhaps always will be. The last decent one was all the way back in 2011 when Fernando Torres upped sticks for London and Liverpool immediately splurged their bonanza on Andy Carroll. It is doubtful we will ever again see such unexpected entertainment – that was a one-off.
Barring the recruitment of an 18-year-old set to be integrated into the Manchester City franchise and Suarez’s arrival, no club residing in the top six got involved nor were they ever going to. It’s January: a time for panic and revision and high-flying sides simply don’t need to resort to such measures. Thursday then played out exactly as its reality dictated. For several clubs it was a final chance to nail down some loans and deal with admin. That aside it was business as usual.
You certainly wouldn’t have thought this however from watching Sky Sports on an endless loop. There it was a circus with Sam Allardyce-shaped clowns and acrobats juggling phones. It was by turns manufactured fun and urgent, this-just-in melodrama that had your senses believing we were at war. It was a relentless barrage of faux-hysteria.
You may think by reading this that I am disparaging of the whole charade. I’m not. Really. I think it’s fantastic. Because throughout a typical year, day in and day out, we are subjected to constant hype insisting upon us that football is significantly more important than it really is. And that’s fine because for most of the time we’re happy to buy into that. It benefits us because it excites us. It’s a two-way deal.
It is still healthy though that once a year, at the end of every January, we see the insincere disconnect of that hype; that we see the media tell us something is really, really important and really, really thrilling when we know it’s really, really not. Because then we’re reminded of the mechanisms in place; the artifice.
Late Thursday evening was our annual prompt that Oz is not real, and that behind the curtain is a small man who resembles Rupert Murdoch, selling us a story.
