VICE Sports Premier League Player of the Weekend: David Silva

(This story originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.)

After careful consideration we've named David Silva our star of the weekend. Man City's Spanish wizard picks up the award for services to intelligent attacking football and giving Chelsea what they deserve.

This week, no matter what else happened, Chelsea couldn't be allowed to do well. David Silva, casting doubt into the minds of atheists everywhere, made sure that Manchester City did their job in supporting the wider footballing community. One of the biggest influences in a dominant 3-0 home win over the reigning champions, his contribution ensured that Jose Mourinho had to compound his poor week by once again addressing the media from a position of shame and weakness. This one goes out to you, Dr. Carneiro.

Silva is without a shadow of a doubt among the most underrated and under-appreciated players in the league at present. The aesthetically pleasing manner with which he plays the game is only second to the intelligence he brings to City's attacking football; when combined, this creates one of the finest sights in the division. His ability to play between the lines and provide intelligent, cutting passes from deep can expose a team faster than an iCloud leak, leaving defenders strewn in his wake like the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan.

Elsewhere, the Premier League is proudly brash and brainless, often taking delight in low-quality, high-scoring matches, prioritising mindless entertainment over skill. Much like a film by Michael Bay, the league often caters for the lowest common denominator, but players like Silva are a welcome antidote to that. If 90% of what is deemed 'quality' in the league is in line with that painting of the dogs playing poker, David Silva is the Sistine Chapel — the complete cultural antithesis to the majority of what else is on offer.

This weekend though, what that wonderful little man helped save us all from doesn't bare thinking about. Chelsea, a club so comfortable and familiar with the morally repugnant that John Terry is their captain-come-deity, might actually have outdone themselves this time around. In search for someone to blame that wasn't himself, Jose Mourinho turned on his medical staff, and absentmindedly blamed them for everything that had gone wrong against Swansea on the opening day.

Little did he know the type of shitstorm he'd just created.

Worryingly, there's no reason to believe that Mourinho actually knew how much this would snowball when he made the decision to start dabbling in another deadly bout of friendly fire. He probably just thought he was doing his usual clever trick of deflecting the blame so far away from himself and his players that nobody would notice how average they'd been on the opening day of the season. But tabloid writers, reporters, and other immoral members of the profession took it upon themselves to create a saga. Just how efficiently they can tear apart a female professional and present her to the public as no more than an over-sexualised pair of tits and an arse is nauseating, but no more than we've become used to.

Rather than concentrate on any of the male members of the medical team that had been unceremoniously hurled into the firing line, the centre of attention quickly became Dr. Eva Carneiro, who's ability as a professional were almost entirely ignored, purely because the mainstream gutter press can't quite help themselves when presented with a female to demonise. One such piece accused the doctor of creating an uncomfortable atmosphere around the dressing room, presumably because the Chelsea players didn't know how to act around someone with more than one braincell and unfamiliar genitalia.

This can't be made any clearer: if Chelsea players are uncomfortable with the presence of a female within the inner-sanctum of the club, what they need is more women working within the environment, not fewer. Just because their captain has an attitude towards the opposite sex about as sophisticated as his understanding of race relations shouldn't matter. Her gender shouldn't matter. What she does in her private life shouldn't matter. How she behaves professionally does, however, and according to the experts, she was well within her rights to seek to provide medical attention to a player showing signs of injuries. The sporting consequences shouldn't even be a concern.

Now, had Chelsea been through all of that business, kiss'n'tell included, and come out the other side with anything less than an embarrassing loss against a title rival, the already questionable theory of karma would've had an awful lot to answer for. As it turned out, David Silva helped save us from all of that (despite Sergio Aguero doing his very best to fuck up every chance presented for what felt like a hundred different scoring opportunities in the opening stages).

So, for services to aesthetically pleasing, intelligent attacking football and giving Chelsea what they deserved, the VICE Sports Player of the Week is David Silva — a man with feet faster than Michael Flatley could dream of, and the ability to place a ball with more accuracy than a predator drone.

@bainsxiii

August 10: Petr Cech (for services to narrative and entertainment)