Give Rooney a Break: This Weekend in the Premier League

It will take a full-blown revolution to free ourselves from the tyranny of Mondays, but until then we can make do with countless petty acts of defiance. First up: flip off your line manager and take a 10-minute loo break at work to read about this weekend in the Premier League.

When Watford’s third goal went into the Newcastle net at St James' Park on Saturday, you can guarantee nobody was more pissed off than Paul Merson. Even more so than Alan Shearer, a man so Geordie he bleeds a liquid mixture of brown ale and Saveloy Dip, Merse would have been livid at the battering dished out to the Toon. Paul "The Magic Man" Merson – whose managerial experience starts and ends with an inglorious two-year spell with Walsall – had this to say when Portuguese coach Marco Silva was appointed Hull manager earlier in the year: "Why has it always got to be a foreign manager… why is this geezer any different to Gary Rowlett?" To Merse, the name Marco Silva doesn’t say "England’s most respected gaffer"; it says "sexy waiter who chats up your wife at the all-inclusive hotel in Benidorm".

Infuriatingly for Merse, having done a passable job at Hull and now a very good job with Watford, Marco Silva is living, breathing testament to the fact that foreignness is not necessarily an obstacle to good coaching. As it turns out, someone who has won trophies at Sporting Lisbon and Olympiakos can manage just as well in the Premier League as, say, Alan Pardew or Gary Megson. For all our proper football men, England isn’t producing many great football managers at the moment, and so clubs inevitably turn to talented coaches overseas. If Paul Merson had his way, Watford would probably be managed by a committee of him, Alan Brazil and "Knock Off" Dan from the chippie (Dan knows the Premier League inside out cos he’s been watching Super Sunday in the pub for 20 years).

When discussing Wayne Rooney’s performances in an Everton shirt, remember: Wazza did not ask for this. Rooney is the Jesus Christ of English football, crucified for our sins so the rest of us might live. Despite the fact he was an unused substitute in the Toffees’ 4-1 defeat to Southampton, Rooney’s name was trending on Twitter as fans criticised everything from his fitness to his wage packet. This is a man who peaked almost ten years ago at this point, yet here we are still relentlessly disparaging him for supposedly being shit.

The thing is, Wayne Rooney is not the reason Everton are hovering just above the relegation zone. He has scored five goals this season, second only to Oumar Niasse, and his performances have been decent compared to many of his teammates. We are all so used to blaming him individually for England’s failure to win major tournaments that we have now lost sight of the bigger picture, which is that Wayne Rooney is a 32-year-old man who wants nothing more than to settle down with a ciggie and a can at the end of the evening. If there’s anything we’ve learned from his numerous tabloid scandals it’s that Wazza has the right to be fallible – he’s no longer a teenage prodigy with the hopes of a nation on his shoulders, but a bloke from Croxteth doing his best to be a human being.

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It would be quintessentially Arsenal to lose in the 92nd minute through a needless penalty. That is exactly the sort of maddening result on which Arsene Wenger has prided himself in recent years. For some reason, though, Burnley seem to feel charitable towards Arsenal, James Tarkowski the latest Clarets player to gift the north Londoners a late penalty with a barge on Aaron Ramsey. Arsenal’s last three wins against Burnley have come courtesy of a Laurent Koscielny handball and two Alexis Sanchez spot kicks, all deep into injury time, with the most recent securing an extremely jammy 1-0 win.

If these are the sorts of results which likely cause Sean Dyche to punch holes in the doors of changing room toilets, they also represent an inverted Arsenal side. This is a team which once went ahead against Liverpool through a penalty in the 98th minute, only for Emmanuel Eboue to give away a pen in the 102nd and piss away an unlikely victory. Seeing Arsenal capitalise on an unnecessary error is vaguely unnerving, unnatural even. It’s just not very them, you know? What next: £200 million on new signings and a serious attempt to win the Premier League?

"I'm on the left, of course," Jurgen Klopp has been quoted as saying in a new biography by Raphael Honigstein. "More left than middle… My political understanding is this. If I am doing well, I want others to do well, too. If there's something I will never do in my life it is vote for the right."

That sounds pretty socialist to me, which will no doubt go down well at Liverpool, a club which has long been associated with left-wing politics both in terms of its managers and its fanbase. It was in that socialist spirit that Liverpool allowed Chelsea to salvage a late 1-1 draw at Anfield this weekend. It’s better for everyone to share the points equally, yeah?

@W_F_Magee