David Moyes' Retirement Cottage: The Premier League Review

In our Premier League Review, we discuss the main talking points from the weekend's top-flight encounters. Here, we marvel at the inevitability of Sunderland's season, and explore the possibility of Bob Mortimer doing MOTD.

With the departure of Sam Allardyce and the hiring of David Moyes, Sunderland appear to have turned a corner. Unfortunately, there's nothing around that corner except constant drudgery, relegation fears and the same brand football they were playing before. Sunderland are the Arsenal of the bottom five, in that they seem to be stuck in an endless loop, most likely the result of a massive rift in the space-time continuum. They have an atrocious start to the season, look doomed by Christmas, go on a run around February and end up finishing 17th. That is what Sunderland fans have to look forward to. That is what people expect on Wearside, because the season never seems to go any other way.

Why anyone would want to watch such a miserable spectacle is beyond us, to be honest. It's almost as if Sunderland fans like the gut-wrenching anxiety of it, as if they like hanging by a thread at the bottom of the Premier League. Some people would claim that Sunderland supporters thrive on adversity, and that it strengthens the sense of community among them. To those people, we say: get over yourselves, with your 'community' and your 'society' and your 'friendship' and your 'local identity'. Watch Manchester United on the telly instead, because they win lots of football matches and are therefore inherently better than everyone else.

With Sunderland losing their second game of the campaign to Middlesbrough, the season's endless loop has reset. They have lost the Tees-Wear derby, they'll probably lose the next eight matches on the trot, and then David Moyes will begin the Sisyphean task of saving the club from relegation once more. Moyes already looks like a bedraggled Scottish gran at this point, exhausted by the thankless toil of football management and desperate to retire to a cottage in rural Aberdeenshire. Coaching Sunderland could be the final straw for him, judging by the pained expression of his face all through the Boro defeat.

New episode shortly, once we've finished doing this… pic.twitter.com/zdAlbnOOnP
— Athletico Mince (@AthleticoMince) August 19, 2016

From the outside observer's perspective, then, things seem fairly bleak on Wearside. Thankfully, there was some light relief from the north-east's favourite comedian on Match of the Day 2. Bob Mortimer made a brief cameo at the start of the show, hanging out next to a plate of chicken dippers and the bloke who tells hipsters to Get In The Sea™. For the rest of the season, we would like to see Bob introduce the programme with an a cappella version of the House of Fools theme tune, in an ensemble with Danny Murphy and an uncomfortable-looking Manish Bhasin.

You can read this week's full Premier League Review here.