Class Warfare: Bad Form

Mark Writes, Rises

Where did we go? The sudden absence of The Trequartistas, once a stronghold of conjecture and dubious predictions, sent ripples through the football blogging world. "Is this the end?", solemnly pondered The Guardian. "TREQUAR-LEFT-US", screamed The Sun, as The Mail suggested our apparent unwillingness to work should be no surprise given several of our members have immigrant roots. Yet, as Cate Blanchett whispered in The Fellowship of the Ring, they were all of them deceived. We were dormant, not extinct. Our silence, far from unexpected, was part of a greater plan. For we at Trequartistas Towers were working on a piece of meta-journalism so ironic, so dastardly, so downright radical that even we sometimes forgot what purpose our secrecy served. We left so that we might return. We left to prove that most ancient of old adages: While form is temporary, class is permanent.


It seems like the most well-worn of cliches; that a bad game doesn't mean a bad player. Yet in the age of the armchair pundit, and indeed the clueless television ex-pro, even such a simplistic narrative has been reduced. We are left with the grunting of morons. Bad pass? Bad player. Win a game? Best team in the World. Those who underachieve are no longer off-the-boil, they are shot completely; husks of their former selves deserving to be put out to pasture, crushed for glue or diced for value ready meals. When a washed-up pro scores a goal it is not a good game or a sign of a purple patch, it is BACK! THE RETURN! There are no shades of grey anymore, no allowances for form, be it good or bad. There is simply the endless mewings of the digital generation, praising a striker as a demi-god one week before damning him as a waste of skin the next without the faintest hint of self-awareness.

Take Newcastle. Now, if we evaluate Newcastle as a collection of players and on recent history, then they seem to be the 7th or 8th best team in the country. They are good without being excellent, with potential to beat the big boys but a chance of also losing to lesser sides. That last season they came 5th was surprising but not shocking; it is perhaps the top end of the range they could perform, but not beyond the realms of belief. This season, with until recently an identical group of players, they lie 16th. Again, this shouldn't be impossible, their players have underperformed and they've suffered injury blows, but mid-lower half seems well within their range. The obvious explanation is a changing in form for various reasons; they are worse than the 5th they managed last season but better than the position they find themselves in now. Yet the frenzy surrounding them this season and last takes no account for such predictable performance fluctuations. Instead, Pardew last season was labelled as a tactical genius and Newcastle as a club on a meteroric rise. This term he is a talentless fool, Ashley naive for signing him up for so long. The masses, and some media, simply cannot comprehend that top performances can mean anything other than a great team, while disasterous defeats can mean something other than a team on the slide. Form has been discarded, it is now class that is temporary.

The same can be said for dozens of players across the league. In the late 90s Alan Shearer suffered a horrendous goalscoring drought for England. Of course it was cause for concern, given his centrality to the team, but he was not castigated as a has been. Instead it was understood that he was a World-Class talent short on form and confidence, and the goals would inevitably return. Now take Antonio Valencia. He has consistently been one of Manchester United's strongest performers over the last few years; his attacking and defensive play central to their continued success. Yet this season he has been considerably below par, not making the runs he once did and with usually dependable crossing unusually erratic. Given his past and his age, being only 27, the signs point to a lack of form rather than irretrievable decline, but you wouldn't know it if you read twitter. "Valencia is shit. I hate this guy", mused the indomitable 5★Gεη. OΙα τoiνoηεη✅, while @adamwaugh1, controversial polemicist that he is, instead proposed that "I actually think valencia has a fear of crossing a ball! Cross the fucking ball u shit cunt!". Maybe it's too easy to pick on twitter idiots, but it is a trend that transcends to the mainstream media as well. Barely a week goes by in which Liverpool are not deemed a rising power or else, having lost to Oldham, a crumbling empire. Clicking through Guardian writers' history shows the same journalist praising Ferguson's tactical nous just months after screaming that he has lost the plot. In a World in which we live from one moment to the next, chronicling swathes of opinion every step of the way, we have lost the ability to stand back and see the bigger picture. Form ebbs and flows, but class is permanant.

In a way, it is a shame The Trequartistas were forced into this absence. We were champing at the bit to reutrn, to pass comment on RVP's wonder, Borussia Dortmund's European tactical blossoming and our predictions for where Pep would go next (we were right). I recall one night walking in on a fellow author at 3am, his face drained of colour as he furtively wrote a draft of a piece on Burkina Faso's defensive solidity in preparation for the African Cup of Nations. "I can't do it any more Mark", he whispered, "I can't play the long game". I gently removed his hand from the mouse and led him away. And play the long game we did. We underperformed, our delivery dried up, our staunchest supporters lost faith. But we did it so we might return, and prove that our dip was just that; form, not class. Now we return in a blaze of glory, point made, project complete. The Trequartistas are back, and let you never doubt our class again.