In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, a stunning, subject-defining passion project that would lay the foundations on which the entirety of the modern scientific community’s understanding of classical mechanics is based.
As far as books about numbers go it was an absolute banger, and would catapult the timid polymath to a surprise knighthood and the kind of fame reserved nowadays for megalomaniac rap narcissists and their alliterative reality TV in-laws. And if Isaac Newton was the Kim K of 17th century physicists, then Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy was very much his Ray J sex tape.
Fundamentally, MPoNP was so significant because it spelled out for the first time Newton’s game-changing Laws of Motion, a trident of physical doctrines that would change our scientific perception of the world forever. Much like the original Star Wars trilogy, the first and second efforts were bloody good, but it was the final instalment that blew unenlightened minds everywhere.
Newton’s third law states that ‘When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.’ In other words, ‘For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Most importantly, for the sake of this laboured introductory tangent, it is from this law that we derive the idiom ‘What goes up must come down’.
Now, obviously the big man was probably talking about gravity and apples and stuff like that, I dunno, but in footballing terms Newton’s third law can commonly be applied to the three clubs fortunate enough to drag their way out of the frenetic cockpit of England’s second tier.
Championship football is a gruesome, nonsensical pantheon of withering dreams, a topsy-turvy death match that pitches itself somewhere between Battle Royale and Wacky Races. Mishaps and capitulations are an inevitability, like playing Twister with Edward Scissorhands.
And yet, for the lucky few who can wriggle free, the carrot at the end of the stick is well worth the years spent chasing it. Riches beyond their wildest dreams, countless opportunities to receive a good old fashioned paddlin’ from a plethora of continental superhumans, Asian fans; they all become a dizzying reality.
Since Nuno Espírito Santo rocked up at Molyneux with Jorge Mendes in tow things have gone pretty well for the only club in England with a badge that can tesselate.
This season’s tributes at the altar of Inflated TV Rights are Wolves, Cardiff, and Fulham, three teams who have been here before, and who will each be looking to secure that most prestigious of honours; a tricky second season.
Let’s start with Wolves. If ever there was a promoted team ready-built for the Premier League, this is it. Since Nuno Espírito Santo rocked up at Molyneux with Jorge Mendes in tow things have gone pretty well for the only club in England with a badge that can tesselate.
It turns out, you see, that Uncle Jorge had also brought with him his magical Mary Poppins carpet bag, full to the brim with prodigious Portuguese talent. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Wanderers eased their way to the Championship title with a side that for the most part resembled a GCSE foreign exchange trip.
Despite widespread protestations about the murky nature of Mendes’ involvement, this summer has seen no let up in the super-agent’s shadowy influence. In have come marquee names like Rui Patricio and Joao Moutinho for a grand pittance of £5m; ludicrous signings for a newly promoted side that combine shrewd business with seven-seasons-deep-into-Football-Manager-esque audacity.
Add to that a club record fee for peroxide juggernaut Adama Traore and a deadline day capture of bright young thing Leon Dendoncker and Wolves look, on paper at least, stronger than any of us could have reasonably foreseen. They’re crossing the Alps and they’re bringing the elephants.
Just as significant has been their retention of precocious talents Ruben Neves and Ivan Cavaleiro, two players who by rights should never have had to endure the ordeal of an away day at Burton Albion, but who, through a combination of good-nature and financial incentives, chose to anyway.
Given the calibre of player Wolves were able to attract in the Championship, the question posed by many in the wake of their promotion was just how ambitious their transfer policy would be this window. This was, after all, an unprecedented second tier squad, with the flair and vision of an outfit much further along in its development.
This summer has only served as evidence to the ambition of the club, both in the market and in their footballing capabilities. It’s difficult not to wonder, with the vast injection of TV money into the English game and the inevitable trickle down this has already caused, if Wolves are less of an anomaly and instead are representative of a new breed of Championship side; Premier League clubs in waiting with the appeal and budget at their disposal to force their way into a seat at the biggest of tables. I refer you to Nottingham Forest forking out £13.2m on Benfica’s Joao Carvalho earlier this summer.
Nonetheless, Wolves, for all their Iberian glitz and glamour, are still a newly promoted side, one not exempt from the perils of integrating an abundance of new signings, and largely untested against the Harry Kanes and Mo Salahs of this world; perhaps unprepared for the stubborn shithousery of a Sean Dyche back four or the relentless buzz of a Jamie Vardy with fresh nicotine patches under each eyelid.
All of this makes Wolves pretty much indecipherable. Europe doesn’t look preposterously unreasonable, but then again neither does a spectacular implosion and successive relegations hastened by the hefty albatross of financial over-exuberance.
The reality will, of course, probably be altogether much more mundane; the comfort of mid-table sweetened by a 2-1 humiliation of Jose’s United at Old Trafford in late September. Mark my words.
That brings us to Fulham, a lily-white testament to the virtues of youth and positivity. Buoyed by the naive effervescence of Ryan Sessegnon and the Balkan thuggery of Aleksander Mitrovic, Slavisa Jokanovic’s side have systematically laid waste to pretty much everything in their path since the turn of the year; a high-pressing, possession-based plague of locusts sponsored by an online casino. Only in the last knockings of their promotion campaign did they falter a little, fluffing their lines in the final act before bouncing back to deservedly scrape through the play-offs.
Since then, the boys from SW6 have done an uncanny impression of an established Premier League side. Cash has been splashed with a pleasing mix of peacock surety and reckless abandon. The £27m pulled out for the Serbian Sam Vokes alone displaced so much water that Shahid Khan was politely reminded of the leisure centre rules on cannonballing.
Not that he took any notice. Eyebrows hit ceilings across the land when one-time Barcelona target and darling of the gossip columns Jean-Michael Seri rocked up at the Cottage with his boots slung over his shoulder and a naughty glint in his eye, while World Cup winner Andre Schurrle is the club’s most shocking acquisition since that statue of Michael Jackson.
Perhaps some of Fulham’s business will be overshadowed by the mesmeric size of the cojones being exhibited up in the West Midlands, but make no mistake, when the boys are back in the barracks and the dust settles, this will come to be regarded as a properly impressive summer from a team absent from the Premier League for four years.
Sweetened by a blizzard of fresh blood in the dying hours of the window, including a club record move for Cameroonian freight train Andre Franck Zambo Anguissa, Fulham’s real triumph, like Wolves, has been retaining an exceptionally gifted core.
When Jokanovic’s squad missed out on automatic promotion at the end of last term pulses must have quickened throughout the club for more than one reason. Aside from the obvious failure and a bottle-job reputation, the fear from an outside perspective was that the carcass of that side would have been picked clean like the cider aisle of a Tesco Extra on a heatwave bank holiday if it had to face another year in the Championship.
EFL Player of the Year Sessegnon was naturally deemed the most precious of cargoes and was presumably hidden in an attic somewhere with a copy of Fortnite and a summer’s worth of Dairylea Lunchables to keep him out of the Top Six’s tractor beams.
Equally as vital, however, has been holding on to captain and talisman Tom Cairney. The Scottish international has repeatedly drawn catcalls and wolf-whistles from West Ham, but his resistance to the charms of industrial-sized bubble machines and mid-game pitch invasions is less a reflection of Manuel Pellegrini’s mumbling revolution and more a ringing endorsement of his current employers’ burgeoning potential.
Ryan Fredricks will be missed, but tenacious pursuits of Alfie Mawson and Joe Bryan have added defensive solidity and marauding creativity in equal measure.
Fulham aren’t going to set the world on fire, but they should be happy basking in the healthy glow of a bonfire of mediocrity, safe from the hellscape of a relegation slugfest, occasionally setting off one of their very expensive fireworks, and going absolutely sick when Little Ryan Sessegnon comes on for the last 12 minutes of a friendly against the USA in November after Ashley Young pulls a hammy.
Few other managers have a section of their Wikipedia page dedicated to ‘Disputes’. Highlights include a foul-mouthed slanging match with Sean Bean.
In Neil Warnock, Cardiff have a manager with the face and emotional range of Livia Soprano. An old school madman, tougher than a blindfolded eye test, a son-in-law’s worst nightmare incarnate; the Steel City psycho is the patron saint of trampolinists and elevator operators everywhere, a dab hand at going up and then straight back down shortly after.
Few other managers have a section of their Wikipedia page dedicated to ‘Disputes’. Highlights include calling El-Hadji Diouf a ‘sewer rat but that might be insulting to sewer rats’ and a foul-mouthed slanging match with Sean Bean over Sheffield United’s relegation from the Premier League in 2007.
Some might see this as a proclivity for lairiness or a damning indictment of the Yorkshire educational system, but for me, Warnock’s disposition boils down to nothing but pure grit.
And that could be crucial for Cardiff this season because on the face of it, without grit they have very little else. It was grit that got them promoted, an abrasive team eroding away at an abrasive league, and if they are to stay up it will be because Warnock has replaced the training ground cornflakes with pebbles and the Andrex with sandpaper.
By normal standards Cardiff have spent big this summer, with everybody’s favourite colourblind marketing guru Vincent Tan getting the chequebook out to land Josh Murphy and Bobby Reid in particular, but we’re a long way through the looking glass nowadays and normal standards just aren’t enough.
With the exception of Harry Arter, none of the Bluebirds’ signings have significant Premier League experience, and while that in itself is not necessarily a problem, you get the distinct impression that this is fundamentally still a Championship side.
This is not to say there aren’t flickers of quality in the squad. Joe Ralls impressed throughout last term in the heart of midfield, Junior Hoilett has the capability to be a devastatingly direct threat, and Sol Bamba’s bones are hewn from granite.
In comparison to the sides they are likely to be competing with, however, Cardiff seem to lack a certain je ne sais quoi, a pizzazz, a razzmatazz. Neil Warnock is so scary that even his own eyebrows fled his face some time ago, but that fire in the pit of his stomach will only drag his team so far before the flames begin to fizzle. All in all, the boys from South Wales should be worried.
To conclude, Isaac Newton might have known a lot, but he knew jack all about the Premier League and when it comes to football not everything that goes up has to come down.
Expect Cardiff.
by Jason Jones
@jwjones57
A speculative effort at football journalism. 