I don't think it's radical to say that I'm missing certain things I used to do before the pandemic. Nor are any of the below peculiar to me - indeed, I think a lot of people are already enjoying many of these things, whether because they live in places that have opened up, or because they live in places that never properly closed down.
Now, the one thing missing from this list is seeing my girlfriend, and that's because she's been spending weekends here with me lately. Having her here is the most important thing of all, and it means waiting for these other things is more bearable.
Getting a drink at the pub: I'm not the biggest drinker, and it's been a while since I've been able to do this, but what I'd really like is one of those lazy Sunday afternoons like I used to get in London, where I'd meet a friend or two, get a nice pub lunch and settle in to watch one or two Premier League matches. The pub lunches would be traditional Sunday roast dinners - roast beef, vegetables, mash and gravy, and my personal favorite part, Yorkshire puddings. I'd wash the food down with a glass or two of Coke, then with belly comfortably lined, I'd switch to a couple of beers. And at the end, not too badly off after the beers and food, I'd ramble home on the train or the tube, full and happy.
Seeing my friends in person: this is kind of allied to the one above, but it's a little more general - I'd love to be able to get together with a group of friends, in a pub or a restaurant or someone's house, and not have to worry about where they've been, whether they'll infect me (or I'll infect them), etc. I've seen my sweetie a few times in the last month, and I've seen my mom and stepdad once, but it'd be great to have dinner, a game night, anything like that.
Getting on a plane: It's funny, given how obnoxious the process of flying anywhere has become since 2001, with every year a new indignity or fee to pay, but what's undimmed is my excitement at being in an airport, getting on a plane and getting to land somewhere new. Or if not somewhere new, then getting back to someplace that I know - it could be Orange County, London, Turin or a new spot like Singapore, Buenos Aires or Tokyo. And while it's being somewhere new that I really miss, settling in for my flight ritual (getting headphones, iPad and book out for easy access, shedding layers I won't need, etc) always means I'm going somewhere new.
Going to a football match: I mentioned watching games on TV earlier, but I also can't wait for the day when I can go to a match in person. And if I say football match, take it as read that I'd like to be able to go to a baseball game or an NFL game or a hockey game too. I wasn't a great one for going to matches when I lived in London, but on the occasions I did go it was a nice way to spend an afternoon - especially when I took friends to see Fulham play at Craven Cottage in West London. They happened to be the cheapest tickets available in the Premiership at the time, and if you went at the start of the season, the location along the river and the family atmosphere was extraordinarily agreeable. And if the quality of MLS isn't quite as high, I'm equally looking forward to catching an Earthquakes game at Avaya Stadium here in Santa Clara.
Sitting at a cafe with a book: this one isn't something I do much here, but it's something I love doing when I'm out of town. I remember some good stops at cafes in Buenos Aires and in Paris, especially after some epic walks through the towns. The one in Buenos Aires was notable for a weird reason (someone had slipped me a fake banknote, though I had a real one to give the waitress when I paid) and for a lovely reason, which is that the hot chocolate and croissant I had were so tasty.
Going to the movies: again, I'm not the only person who misses going to the movies. But it's worth saying - watching a movie in a darkened room on a huge screen, among loads of people who are just as excited about it as me, is something else I'm looking forward to. And making plans with friends or with my honey to go see something is great, but I also miss the times I've dropped in alone at the cinema on a whim and caught something fun, like Drive or Teen Titans Go to the Movies.
Walking down Piccadilly to the Big Waterstones: this one takes in a few different things. First is browsing bookshops for fun - I've mentioned the Big Waterstones, which is my favorite bookstore in the world, but I equally miss stopping in at Kepler's here in Menlo Park, or Books Inc in Palo Alto and Mountain View, or even the two afternoons I spent at Powell's in Portland. But the Big Waterstone's has its own ritual, which involves me taking in all five floors of books, including sometimes the cafe. Of course, there's a ritual involved before I get to the store - which is walking down to Piccadilly from Leicester Square or Tottenham Court Road. It usually involves a stop at the Forbidden Planet and Foyle's on Charing Cross Road, and it also frequently involves a stop for lunch along the way, and sometimes a stop at the British Museum (if the line isn't too long). Because I'm usually in London on vacation, I don't have loads of space for all the books I'd like to buy, but seeing the travel section, the fiction (and science fiction) section, and the history section always makes me feel good.
Taking a long train ride: here's another one that's mostly for Europe, though I'd love to do it here too. I have some great memories of taking the Eurostar between London and Paris, especially when I discovered that business class includes a pretty great meal (with wine!), as well as the route between London and Edinburgh or the time I took the high-speed train from Turin to Rome with my dad. But the highlight of recent years remains 2014, when I treated myself to the Eurostar and TGV from London to Turin, stopping in Paris to change trains, and stations. I'd sprung for business on the Eurostar, so I got a lovely breakfast on the first leg, and for first class on the TGV for the second leg. In changing from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, I saw the French newspapers commemorating the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Landings. And on the second leg I was treated to a crossing of the Alps in grand style, soundtracked by the epic number of podcasts I'd downloaded to my phone.
Taking a road trip: here's one for the US. A tradition from the past few years has been to take a trip to the mountains during the summer with my dad - usually somewhere in the Sierra Nevada, otherwise heading up to Northern California and southern Oregon. We spent the end of the 2018 World Cup on the road, watching the final in our hotel room in Crescent City. But it also reminds me of the time I drove down to Joshua Tree for a camping trip with friends (later that same year, as it happens), and the time I drove up to the Avenue of the Giants for a half-marathon... races, incidentally, being another thing I'm looking forward to being able to do again someday soon. There's something so great about hopping in the car for a long drive, podcasts and music at the ready, and knowing that you're on your own schedule. And of course, having somewhere to be at the end of that drive.
Stopping randomly at the store for something: This is the final one, and while it's not the most important, it's also not the least important. Going to the store involves such a production now, between wearing a mask and standing in line to get in, that there's no sense in doing a small expedition - to say nothing of the fact that being among so many other people is still a risk. More than anything, the normality of being able to just run a couple of errands in the course of the day is sorely missed. While I won't be trying to force it, I can't wait for the day when I can stop in at the store for a bottle of Coke or iced tea, without a mask and without standing in line outside.
And as I say, I'm not the only one.
Sunday 26 July 2020
Sunday 19 July 2020
Immaturity and Self-Conscious Masculinity
Something struck me the other day as I was watching Ford v Ferrari on HBO the other night. I'd been trying to put my finger on it for a while, but it occurred to me that there was a quality to the performances by Christian Bale and Matt Damon in particular, something that felt very of-our-current-time. And about 90 minutes into the movie (side note: movies are too fucking long), the best I could come up with was a certain self-conscious quality to their masculinity.
It's a reasonable movie, by the way. I knew when I first saw the trailers the kind of portrayal they'd give the Italian characters, and indeed, there's a bit of skullduggery and cheating, and people saying things sneeringly in languages that our plucky American heroes (like, er, Lee Iacocca) don't understand. And of course, Henry Ford II gets away with calling Enzo Ferrari a "greasy whop", which, um, yay for casual racism - imagine a "good guy" figure in a movie saying the equivalent slur about a Black character...
Still, it's a fun movie, the racing scenes look gorgeous and the performances are entertaining. I joke about Lee Iacocca, but he's played by the ever-reliable Jon Bernthal, an actor I really appreciate. Matt Damon and Christian Bale are good too, though as I say, there's some tic to their performances that I'm trying to figure out.
The best I can put it is, as I say, self-consciousness. Possibly because being a man, in a world of men such as racing, is freighted with a bunch of associations that are a little outdated now. In the 1960s an actor like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen could stride across the screen knowing his place in the world, and the audience knew what kind of guy he was. Two-fisted, quick-drawing, irresistible to the ladies, etc etc.
John Wayne was expected to be the stoic rock upon which the world broke, and to protect the women around him, though "around" was a relative term because they were frequently not around (with the exception of something like True Grit or Stagecoach). He could play his roles that way because women weren't expected to be public, weren't expected to be doing stuff. Women in the 1960s were more likely to be homemakers (white women, at any rate), so movies tended to be made for the people with the buying power in the household, aka the men.
Ford v Ferrari has exactly one female character with a name: Mollie Miles (played by Caitriona Balfe), who is the wife of Christian Bale's character, Ken Miles. I'm not saying this to criticize the movie - after all, in that decade there likely weren't that many women in the actual racing scene, so you want to keep things close to accurate.
Nor am I saying it's a great thing, as the lack of women in spheres like that came from decades and centuries of diminishing the capabilities of women and actively keeping them away from such activities. It's simply the fact that because there likely weren't that many women working at Shelby American in 1966, there won't be many roles for them in this movie.
But it's hard to escape the feeling that Damon and Bale's performances are acknowledging these cultural aspects from the perspective of our supposedly more enlightened times. They don't go as far as Mad Men in depicting just how different those times were from now, nor are they as blatant (which is fine with me, because I've never been able to get past the third episode of that infernal show).
What stands out for me is the scene where Shelby and Miles fight each other on the corner in front of Ken Miles's house, and Mollie sets her lawn chair out to make sure they don't get up to too much mischief. At the end she brings them each a Coke, and they clink bottles and make up.
It's hard to imagine a scene like that in a movie from even 30 years ago. There were probably fistfights, but Mollie bringing them bottles of Coke afterwards is meant to underline that they're being childish, which is the default assumption of male characters in media nowadays.
As another example, there's Chris Pratt's character in... I was going to say Jurassic World but that's the same character as Star-Lord in the Marvel movies. He alternates between super-competent (bragging to the nerdy kid that he's the "alpha" for the velociraptors) and childishly stupid, especially in his interactions with Bryce Dallas Howard.
Again, it's hard to imagine a female character in a John Wayne movie dismissing him as being childish - at the very least I haven't seen it in any of his films I've watched. If anything, he's usually portrayed as the mature one, compared to his female costar in something like The Quiet Man.
Probably the other reason I'm thinking about male maturity and immaturity is a podcast I listened to recently. Because I've gone through most of my backlogs, I decided to check out The Art of Manliness, in the hopes of hearing people talking about interesting or useful subjects. One episode, from about 2012 I assume, featured an interview with a researcher who talked about a trend of immaturity among men in recent years.
He seemed to boil it down to them playing video games or reading comics, in lieu of setting up meaningful relationships with women or getting high-powered jobs or whatever. The discussion was fairly interesting, if a bit limited - he declined to talk about what female immaturity looks like, for example (his research is exclusively on men), and didn't really examine the role that our consumeristic and media-driven culture has had on infantilizing everyone.
And I think because of that he missed a key point about immaturity. Or rather, because he actually researched it and I'm some dummy writing about it on his blog, he failed to give the fully nuanced picture it deserves. Strictly speaking, video games and comics and sports aren't enough to drive a man (or any gender, frankly) to be immature - it's the role these things play in a person's life. I'm a grown man with a full-time job and a long-term relationship, for example, neither of which is affected by the fact that I read comics or sometimes play video games.
To put it another way, if I'm immature, it's because of certain things I haven't had to worry about in my life - raising kids, for instance, or illness or grappling with real poverty. And I don't deny a certain amount of immaturity - I'm sure I've said to my girlfriend that if I'd met her six years ago, when I moved back from London, I wouldn't have been quite as mature as I am now, or generally ready for the relationship, however we want to define readiness. At the very least I was a different person from now.
I don't doubt that a large number of people really are immature - unable to make sensible decisions about their money, their relationships or their jobs (and this is, again, separate from people who've had properly hard lives, and who haven't had the luxury of deferring these decisions). But I also suspect that now men are expected to be immature in certain things - to balance being competent in one aspect of their lives with being completely helpless in others.
This is, of course, kind of regressive against women in itself. To assume that women are the only ones who can properly take care of the home or the kids is both a weird backsliding to so-called traditional gender roles and ammunition in the Mommy Wars, where people shame women for not doing everything effortlessly.
To return to the original point about portrayals in Ford v Ferrari... I called the performances self-conscious, but it also feels like a trend you see in a lot of actors. It's cliche to say that men have "lost their confidence", and I think that some of that confidence deserved to be lost, but more than any value judgement, the reason I note this style of performance is that in future it'll be a clear indicator of the time period, just as surely as Robert Altman's overlapping dialogue is an indicator of the time period he worked in. I'll leave it to the sociologists to draw the real meaning from Matt Damon and Christian Bale's performances.
And hopefully by then it won't be okay to say "greasy whop" onscreen anymore...
It's a reasonable movie, by the way. I knew when I first saw the trailers the kind of portrayal they'd give the Italian characters, and indeed, there's a bit of skullduggery and cheating, and people saying things sneeringly in languages that our plucky American heroes (like, er, Lee Iacocca) don't understand. And of course, Henry Ford II gets away with calling Enzo Ferrari a "greasy whop", which, um, yay for casual racism - imagine a "good guy" figure in a movie saying the equivalent slur about a Black character...
Still, it's a fun movie, the racing scenes look gorgeous and the performances are entertaining. I joke about Lee Iacocca, but he's played by the ever-reliable Jon Bernthal, an actor I really appreciate. Matt Damon and Christian Bale are good too, though as I say, there's some tic to their performances that I'm trying to figure out.
The best I can put it is, as I say, self-consciousness. Possibly because being a man, in a world of men such as racing, is freighted with a bunch of associations that are a little outdated now. In the 1960s an actor like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen could stride across the screen knowing his place in the world, and the audience knew what kind of guy he was. Two-fisted, quick-drawing, irresistible to the ladies, etc etc.
John Wayne was expected to be the stoic rock upon which the world broke, and to protect the women around him, though "around" was a relative term because they were frequently not around (with the exception of something like True Grit or Stagecoach). He could play his roles that way because women weren't expected to be public, weren't expected to be doing stuff. Women in the 1960s were more likely to be homemakers (white women, at any rate), so movies tended to be made for the people with the buying power in the household, aka the men.
Ford v Ferrari has exactly one female character with a name: Mollie Miles (played by Caitriona Balfe), who is the wife of Christian Bale's character, Ken Miles. I'm not saying this to criticize the movie - after all, in that decade there likely weren't that many women in the actual racing scene, so you want to keep things close to accurate.
Nor am I saying it's a great thing, as the lack of women in spheres like that came from decades and centuries of diminishing the capabilities of women and actively keeping them away from such activities. It's simply the fact that because there likely weren't that many women working at Shelby American in 1966, there won't be many roles for them in this movie.
But it's hard to escape the feeling that Damon and Bale's performances are acknowledging these cultural aspects from the perspective of our supposedly more enlightened times. They don't go as far as Mad Men in depicting just how different those times were from now, nor are they as blatant (which is fine with me, because I've never been able to get past the third episode of that infernal show).
What stands out for me is the scene where Shelby and Miles fight each other on the corner in front of Ken Miles's house, and Mollie sets her lawn chair out to make sure they don't get up to too much mischief. At the end she brings them each a Coke, and they clink bottles and make up.
It's hard to imagine a scene like that in a movie from even 30 years ago. There were probably fistfights, but Mollie bringing them bottles of Coke afterwards is meant to underline that they're being childish, which is the default assumption of male characters in media nowadays.
As another example, there's Chris Pratt's character in... I was going to say Jurassic World but that's the same character as Star-Lord in the Marvel movies. He alternates between super-competent (bragging to the nerdy kid that he's the "alpha" for the velociraptors) and childishly stupid, especially in his interactions with Bryce Dallas Howard.
Again, it's hard to imagine a female character in a John Wayne movie dismissing him as being childish - at the very least I haven't seen it in any of his films I've watched. If anything, he's usually portrayed as the mature one, compared to his female costar in something like The Quiet Man.
Probably the other reason I'm thinking about male maturity and immaturity is a podcast I listened to recently. Because I've gone through most of my backlogs, I decided to check out The Art of Manliness, in the hopes of hearing people talking about interesting or useful subjects. One episode, from about 2012 I assume, featured an interview with a researcher who talked about a trend of immaturity among men in recent years.
He seemed to boil it down to them playing video games or reading comics, in lieu of setting up meaningful relationships with women or getting high-powered jobs or whatever. The discussion was fairly interesting, if a bit limited - he declined to talk about what female immaturity looks like, for example (his research is exclusively on men), and didn't really examine the role that our consumeristic and media-driven culture has had on infantilizing everyone.
And I think because of that he missed a key point about immaturity. Or rather, because he actually researched it and I'm some dummy writing about it on his blog, he failed to give the fully nuanced picture it deserves. Strictly speaking, video games and comics and sports aren't enough to drive a man (or any gender, frankly) to be immature - it's the role these things play in a person's life. I'm a grown man with a full-time job and a long-term relationship, for example, neither of which is affected by the fact that I read comics or sometimes play video games.
To put it another way, if I'm immature, it's because of certain things I haven't had to worry about in my life - raising kids, for instance, or illness or grappling with real poverty. And I don't deny a certain amount of immaturity - I'm sure I've said to my girlfriend that if I'd met her six years ago, when I moved back from London, I wouldn't have been quite as mature as I am now, or generally ready for the relationship, however we want to define readiness. At the very least I was a different person from now.
I don't doubt that a large number of people really are immature - unable to make sensible decisions about their money, their relationships or their jobs (and this is, again, separate from people who've had properly hard lives, and who haven't had the luxury of deferring these decisions). But I also suspect that now men are expected to be immature in certain things - to balance being competent in one aspect of their lives with being completely helpless in others.
This is, of course, kind of regressive against women in itself. To assume that women are the only ones who can properly take care of the home or the kids is both a weird backsliding to so-called traditional gender roles and ammunition in the Mommy Wars, where people shame women for not doing everything effortlessly.
To return to the original point about portrayals in Ford v Ferrari... I called the performances self-conscious, but it also feels like a trend you see in a lot of actors. It's cliche to say that men have "lost their confidence", and I think that some of that confidence deserved to be lost, but more than any value judgement, the reason I note this style of performance is that in future it'll be a clear indicator of the time period, just as surely as Robert Altman's overlapping dialogue is an indicator of the time period he worked in. I'll leave it to the sociologists to draw the real meaning from Matt Damon and Christian Bale's performances.
And hopefully by then it won't be okay to say "greasy whop" onscreen anymore...
Sunday 12 July 2020
Catching up on Avatar The Last Airbender
Finally catching Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix, and it feels like just what I've needed in this lockdown period.
I missed it the first time around, though I've been hearing people talk about it for years. I listened to Janet Varney's podcast, the JV Club, for a bunch of years, where she spoke to people about her role on the successor show, The Legend of Korra, and as I've gotten into ATLA I've come to understand about 20% more of the memes flying around the internet nowadays.
I'm not sure how much I love the animation style, as I'm generally iffy on Western artists using the Japanese anime/manga style, but because I like the style overall, I don't let it bother me too much. What I do love about it, though, is the fluidity with which they animate the action sequences - when characters are fighting you can see that they've taken advantage of actual martial arts consultants to depict the forms and movements. And on top of that, the frame rate is impressively smooth, more like a high-level Disney movie at times than a standard anime.
The other thing I love is the storytelling. The characters are impressively well-drawn, both the good guys and the bad guys, and some gain more depth as the series goes on. The best example here is Prince Zuko, who shows up in the first episode as The Baddie, but we soon learn that he's not enjoying the best reputation at home in the Fire Nation, and over time we see him make choices to become a much more complicated character.
And as I was telling my girlfriend, it benefits from surprising emotional resonance, such as when Aang has to grapple with the deaths a century earlier of his friends and mentors at the Air Temple, or in Iroh's Tale in season two, where we see Prince Zuko's Uncle Iroh grieving his son, who died years earlier in the Fire Nation's endless war of conquest.
The storytelling doesn't talk down to the kids who were meant to form its audience, and without being excessively mature it manages therefore to appeal to adults (at least, to this adult). In that it reminds me of some of the best episodes of Batman: The Animated Series or Justice League/Justice League Unlimited.
The other thing it has in common with those shows is its voice director, Andrea Romano, who reliably finds some great talents to voice the characters. One notable character that I've just started to encounter (I'm most of the way through Season 2) is Long Feng, who's voiced by Clancy Brown, channeling his role in the DCAU shows as Lex Luthor. The other notable thing is that, even though the main voice cast isn't Asian, the show does give a lot of great roles to Asian actors, most notably the late Mako in the role of Uncle Iroh.
I questioned the use of anime style for the animation earlier, but I do love the Asian influence overall, in the language, locales and general design. Reading the Wikipedia page I saw that the creators initially wanted to have the Fire Nation as stand-ins for the Japanese, but I'm glad they blended them more with other Asian cultures - both because of wanting to avoid the negative backlash from Japanese-American and Japanese viewers, but also because stories like this tend to resonate better when you're not trying to match each character, faction or style to a direct analogue from the real world.
By not basing the Fire Nation exactly on the Japanese, it became easier for the producers to take the characters, both individually and as a group, in directions that made sense for the narrative, rather than being locked into following actual Japanese history. And the same goes for all the other characters and factions, even when they look a lot like Chinese, Korean or Inuit cultures.
As I say, I'm a little more than halfway through. The show is so entertaining, and flows so well from episode to episode, that it's easy for me to binge several at a time, and therefore I expect to finish it pretty soon. I'm looking forward to seeing how Aang's quest ends, and I'm hoping that Netflix will make Korra available for streaming someday soon (bizarrely, the last time I checked there wasn't much of it available on DVD for rental).
I missed it the first time around, though I've been hearing people talk about it for years. I listened to Janet Varney's podcast, the JV Club, for a bunch of years, where she spoke to people about her role on the successor show, The Legend of Korra, and as I've gotten into ATLA I've come to understand about 20% more of the memes flying around the internet nowadays.
I'm not sure how much I love the animation style, as I'm generally iffy on Western artists using the Japanese anime/manga style, but because I like the style overall, I don't let it bother me too much. What I do love about it, though, is the fluidity with which they animate the action sequences - when characters are fighting you can see that they've taken advantage of actual martial arts consultants to depict the forms and movements. And on top of that, the frame rate is impressively smooth, more like a high-level Disney movie at times than a standard anime.
The other thing I love is the storytelling. The characters are impressively well-drawn, both the good guys and the bad guys, and some gain more depth as the series goes on. The best example here is Prince Zuko, who shows up in the first episode as The Baddie, but we soon learn that he's not enjoying the best reputation at home in the Fire Nation, and over time we see him make choices to become a much more complicated character.
And as I was telling my girlfriend, it benefits from surprising emotional resonance, such as when Aang has to grapple with the deaths a century earlier of his friends and mentors at the Air Temple, or in Iroh's Tale in season two, where we see Prince Zuko's Uncle Iroh grieving his son, who died years earlier in the Fire Nation's endless war of conquest.
The storytelling doesn't talk down to the kids who were meant to form its audience, and without being excessively mature it manages therefore to appeal to adults (at least, to this adult). In that it reminds me of some of the best episodes of Batman: The Animated Series or Justice League/Justice League Unlimited.
The other thing it has in common with those shows is its voice director, Andrea Romano, who reliably finds some great talents to voice the characters. One notable character that I've just started to encounter (I'm most of the way through Season 2) is Long Feng, who's voiced by Clancy Brown, channeling his role in the DCAU shows as Lex Luthor. The other notable thing is that, even though the main voice cast isn't Asian, the show does give a lot of great roles to Asian actors, most notably the late Mako in the role of Uncle Iroh.
I questioned the use of anime style for the animation earlier, but I do love the Asian influence overall, in the language, locales and general design. Reading the Wikipedia page I saw that the creators initially wanted to have the Fire Nation as stand-ins for the Japanese, but I'm glad they blended them more with other Asian cultures - both because of wanting to avoid the negative backlash from Japanese-American and Japanese viewers, but also because stories like this tend to resonate better when you're not trying to match each character, faction or style to a direct analogue from the real world.
By not basing the Fire Nation exactly on the Japanese, it became easier for the producers to take the characters, both individually and as a group, in directions that made sense for the narrative, rather than being locked into following actual Japanese history. And the same goes for all the other characters and factions, even when they look a lot like Chinese, Korean or Inuit cultures.
As I say, I'm a little more than halfway through. The show is so entertaining, and flows so well from episode to episode, that it's easy for me to binge several at a time, and therefore I expect to finish it pretty soon. I'm looking forward to seeing how Aang's quest ends, and I'm hoping that Netflix will make Korra available for streaming someday soon (bizarrely, the last time I checked there wasn't much of it available on DVD for rental).
Sunday 5 July 2020
Manchester United Starting to Come Good
So it only took more than a year, but it looks like Manchester United is finding its level. The team is undefeated in the league since the restart, and indeed undefeated since 22 January, when they lost 2-0 to Burnley.
The main reason for the uptick in form seems to have been the signing of Bruno Fernandes from Sporting in Portugal, during the January transfer window. This tactical analysis is from before he signed, but casts an eye on how he'd fit into the United team, and it seems to be borne out by the facts since his arrival at Old Trafford.
But beyond the numbers on the pitch, what's interesting is that manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer even made this transfer. It's not excessive to state how precarious his position was by the time the January transfer window rolled around - a couple of pundits on the Guardian Football Weekly had even predicted at the start of this season that he'd be sacked by November, such was the drop in form after his appointment as permanent manager at the end of last season.
He'd seemed to grab the players' attention in his first few games, winning an impressive streak in the league and coming back from an inauspicious first leg in the Champions League to beat Paris St-Germain. He'd even gotten some good form out of Paul Pogba, whose inconsistency under Jose Mourinho must have contributed to his sacking and Solskjaer's appointment.
But then Pogba went AWOL again this season, with a long-term ankle injury, and a 4-0 defeat of Chelsea notwithstanding, United spent the first few months of the campaign looking like they were in crisis again. But for every poor result, they managed to rescue Solskjaer with a win (or at least a creditable performance) right after, and so he hung on, indeed long past when Mauricio Pochettino was sacked by Spurs and replaced by Mourinho.
Manchester United is a bit of a weird club. It's one of the richest, if not the absolutely most profitable, in the world. Yet despite that, the stadium grows increasingly shabby and the football takes a back seat to the sponsorship deals - though these deals, ironically, are probably what left United in such good shape to weather the coronavirus shutdown without putting players or staff on furlough.
In a way, that lack of interest in the footballing side of being a football club may also have saved Solskjaer - he wasn't picking too many fights with the players or overseeing too many embarrassing defeats, so the owners might have been happy to keep him in place until someone better came along. You see this attitude a lot in the Premier League at the moment, where owners like Mike Ashley are happy to let their clubs (in this case Newcastle) rot as long as they stay in the top division.
But I think it's also interesting that Solskjaer had the vision for how he wanted the team to play (a thing that wasn't always clear as they went into their decline after his appointment) and was able to buy the player he wanted to make that vision a reality. There was a sense, reading the football pages in the last months of 2019, of him being a little isolated and not entirely in charge. The idea that Pogba might still be at the club by the end of the season tended to be met with laughter.
Still, it's clear that Solskjaer knew how he wanted the team to play, and found the player who could do that, either on his own or, as the manager must have preferred, in partnership with Pogba. In one stroke, Solskjaer strengthens his team, and also puts his star midfielder on notice that he can get by without him - depending on Pogba's level of professionalism, that either lights a fire under him to work harder, or indicates that he's working with a manager who knows what he's doing.
And in the meantime Fernandes has scored 6 goals in 9 appearances, plus 5 assists to boot, linking up with Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial quite well.
I suspect Pogba is still likely to leave during the next transfer window, though it's notable he hasn't followed the example of Leroy Sané, who jumped ship from Manchester City mid-season to go back to Germany. If Juventus wants Pogba back, or one of the Spanish giants, or even PSG, it's hard to imagine him not making the leap. But Fernandes seems to have filled the gap left by Pogba's season-long injury quite impressively, and he looks like he'll be a good replacement if Pogba leaves.
The other point to think about is the speed with which clubs replace managers. United famously endured a poor start to Alex Ferguson's tenure in 1986, but stuck with him and were rewarded by the most dominant display in English football history (he says with possibly unwarranted confidence). As I mentioned last week, United has won 29 trophies in the past 30 years (not counting Community Shields), and several of those have also come in the years since Ferguson retired, though notably they haven't won the league since then.
One hesitates to say that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is the next manifestation of Sir Alex Ferguson, but you can appreciate his role in how football writers are starting to entertain the prospect of United challenging for the title next season. If that does happen, it'll probably cement the disciples of Ferguson at the club forever, for better or worse; though it feels equally likely that things go desperately wrong for Solskjaer again and that this time he doesn't survive the slump.
It also makes me wonder again about a point from Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, where they argue that the manager is actually not as relevant to the success of a team as we think. They have a new edition out, and I feel like I need to revisit it to see how that suggestion of theirs squares with the experience of managers like Solskjaer, Mourinho or Claudio Ranieri, not to mention super-managers like Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp in the last five years.
The main reason for the uptick in form seems to have been the signing of Bruno Fernandes from Sporting in Portugal, during the January transfer window. This tactical analysis is from before he signed, but casts an eye on how he'd fit into the United team, and it seems to be borne out by the facts since his arrival at Old Trafford.
But beyond the numbers on the pitch, what's interesting is that manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer even made this transfer. It's not excessive to state how precarious his position was by the time the January transfer window rolled around - a couple of pundits on the Guardian Football Weekly had even predicted at the start of this season that he'd be sacked by November, such was the drop in form after his appointment as permanent manager at the end of last season.
He'd seemed to grab the players' attention in his first few games, winning an impressive streak in the league and coming back from an inauspicious first leg in the Champions League to beat Paris St-Germain. He'd even gotten some good form out of Paul Pogba, whose inconsistency under Jose Mourinho must have contributed to his sacking and Solskjaer's appointment.
But then Pogba went AWOL again this season, with a long-term ankle injury, and a 4-0 defeat of Chelsea notwithstanding, United spent the first few months of the campaign looking like they were in crisis again. But for every poor result, they managed to rescue Solskjaer with a win (or at least a creditable performance) right after, and so he hung on, indeed long past when Mauricio Pochettino was sacked by Spurs and replaced by Mourinho.
Manchester United is a bit of a weird club. It's one of the richest, if not the absolutely most profitable, in the world. Yet despite that, the stadium grows increasingly shabby and the football takes a back seat to the sponsorship deals - though these deals, ironically, are probably what left United in such good shape to weather the coronavirus shutdown without putting players or staff on furlough.
In a way, that lack of interest in the footballing side of being a football club may also have saved Solskjaer - he wasn't picking too many fights with the players or overseeing too many embarrassing defeats, so the owners might have been happy to keep him in place until someone better came along. You see this attitude a lot in the Premier League at the moment, where owners like Mike Ashley are happy to let their clubs (in this case Newcastle) rot as long as they stay in the top division.
But I think it's also interesting that Solskjaer had the vision for how he wanted the team to play (a thing that wasn't always clear as they went into their decline after his appointment) and was able to buy the player he wanted to make that vision a reality. There was a sense, reading the football pages in the last months of 2019, of him being a little isolated and not entirely in charge. The idea that Pogba might still be at the club by the end of the season tended to be met with laughter.
Still, it's clear that Solskjaer knew how he wanted the team to play, and found the player who could do that, either on his own or, as the manager must have preferred, in partnership with Pogba. In one stroke, Solskjaer strengthens his team, and also puts his star midfielder on notice that he can get by without him - depending on Pogba's level of professionalism, that either lights a fire under him to work harder, or indicates that he's working with a manager who knows what he's doing.
And in the meantime Fernandes has scored 6 goals in 9 appearances, plus 5 assists to boot, linking up with Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial quite well.
I suspect Pogba is still likely to leave during the next transfer window, though it's notable he hasn't followed the example of Leroy Sané, who jumped ship from Manchester City mid-season to go back to Germany. If Juventus wants Pogba back, or one of the Spanish giants, or even PSG, it's hard to imagine him not making the leap. But Fernandes seems to have filled the gap left by Pogba's season-long injury quite impressively, and he looks like he'll be a good replacement if Pogba leaves.
The other point to think about is the speed with which clubs replace managers. United famously endured a poor start to Alex Ferguson's tenure in 1986, but stuck with him and were rewarded by the most dominant display in English football history (he says with possibly unwarranted confidence). As I mentioned last week, United has won 29 trophies in the past 30 years (not counting Community Shields), and several of those have also come in the years since Ferguson retired, though notably they haven't won the league since then.
One hesitates to say that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is the next manifestation of Sir Alex Ferguson, but you can appreciate his role in how football writers are starting to entertain the prospect of United challenging for the title next season. If that does happen, it'll probably cement the disciples of Ferguson at the club forever, for better or worse; though it feels equally likely that things go desperately wrong for Solskjaer again and that this time he doesn't survive the slump.
It also makes me wonder again about a point from Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, where they argue that the manager is actually not as relevant to the success of a team as we think. They have a new edition out, and I feel like I need to revisit it to see how that suggestion of theirs squares with the experience of managers like Solskjaer, Mourinho or Claudio Ranieri, not to mention super-managers like Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp in the last five years.
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