Five early pre-season quirks: Spurs eschew defenders, no rest for Liverpool man, Arsenal unofficially strong

We all love pre-season, don’t we? All the games, all the football, some of the players, none of the importance. Yes, pre-season is great.

And one of the great things about pre-season is getting very carried away by things that genuinely mean absolutely nothing whatsoever in the grander scheme.

Here, in that spirit, are five quirky bits and bobs from the first week or so of match-based preparation for the long, long season ahead.

And here are the full fixtures and results from all 20 Premier League clubs.

Tottenham leaning fully into the vibes
We all enjoyed Spurs’ maverick approach to defending last season, fielding at times through a combination of accident and design a back four comprised entirely of full-backs.

In hindsight, the next logical step was always to stop picking defenders in defence altogether.

In their two pre-season games thus far – which have produced a 5-1 win at Hearts and a 2-0 victory at QPR – Ange Postecoglou has selected Oliver Skipp and Archie Gray as his starting centre-back pairing.

While Micky van de Ven, Cristian Romero and Radu Dragusin will all soon return to contention after an extended post-tournament break, it’s still typically bold from Postecoglou, who did still have actual centre-back options to consider; Ashley Phillips has come off the bench in both games.

We did have it in mind that part of Gray’s appeal to Spurs – given his experience as both a right-back and midfielder at Leeds – was his potential as a very Postecoglou right-back with the amount of midfield work inherent to that task. And given what a short journey it is from right-back to centre-back under Big Ange, we perhaps should have seen this coming.

Delighted to report Spurs fans have also reached the ‘Djed Spence could be like a new signing’ stage of pre-season after an assist and a couple of eye-catching recovery runs. Comes earlier every year.

No rest for Szoboszlai
Those involved in either the Euros or Copa America have generally and entirely understandably been absent thus far with one conspicuously high-profile exception.

Hungary’s Dominic Szoboszlai played just over 30 minutes from the start of Liverpool’s behind-closed-doors friendly against Preston in a game that marked Arne Slot’s first team selection of any kind as the new Liverpool manager.

To add to the curiousness of this, Andy Robertson – who went out of Euro 2024 at the same stage and indeed during the very same dramatically-concluded match as Szoboszlai – did not feature.

Liverpool also lost the game 1-0 but we’re all far too grown up here to pretend pre-season results matter either way.

Which is not, it turns out, the case for everyone.

The saltiest match report ever   
Sitting firmly in the ‘cliché because truth’ category lies the accepted wisdom that pre-season games are truly the ones where performances trump results. It literally doesn’t matter whether you win, lose or draw if you take from what is a glorified training (and quite often money-making) exercise that which you wished to obtain.

Should Liverpool’s season turn out to be a dud, few if any will point to a 1-0 defeat to Preston at the AXA Training Centre as even the most trivial of contributing factors.

Which is why the match report on Everton’s official site after an entertaining 3-3 draw with Sligo Rovers is instantly one of our favourite ever match reports, and not just pre-season.

We simply cannot imagine having this kind of public breakdown about a pre-season friendly when it isn’t even August yet. Less still getting this vexed while being an Everton fan. If a 3-3 pre-season draw with Sligo ranks even in the top 100 unpleasantnesses to befall the Toffees this season then they’ve had a blissful campaign.

And yet the saltiness leaks out of every paragraph about a result that quite literally does not matter. It’s an incredible piece of work. We could but won’t include the whole thing, instead cherrypicking a few of our very favourite lines.

The Toffees looked to be heading for defeat after somehow going into the interval 2-0 down despite dominating, while Mason Holgate’s close-range header was quickly pegged back by Sligo’s third of the afternoon.

SOMEHOW! We also don’t want to tread too egregiously on Football Cliches’ turf, but pretty sure ‘pegged back’ is not the preferred nomenclature for a goal that turns a 2-1 lead into a 3-1 lead.

Everton should have been well ahead by this point, making Sligo’s 34th-minute opener all the more frustrating as Luke Pearce met a near-post corner to flick past Joao Virginia.

Somehow the scoreboard read 2-0 on 41 minutes, Virginia pushing away Daire Patton’s strike only for Kyle McDonagh to tuck home the rebound.

And it goes on like this.

And a maddening first half was summed up seconds before the break when Maupay struck a half-volley from 20 yards out that beat Walsh but smacked the inside of the right-hand post.

Not even James Maddison got this wound up by Neal Maupay, lads. It can’t be healthy to be in this kind of state about a 3-3 draw in July. There is a long, long way to travel and far greater setbacks to negotiate by May. Pace yourselves, we beg of you.

Aston Villa more consistent than ever
Villa’s success in finishing fourth last season and earning a crack at the (albeit now ruined by its insane format) Champions League was built primarily on being more consistent and just fundamentally less silly than any of the three Big Six teams plus Newcastle who finished below them.

And the really encouraging news for Villa fans is that they appear to have taken that consistency to whole new heights this summer having decided that the only way to go about things is to win 3-0 with Morgan Rogers on the scoresheet. First Walsall and then Spartak Trnava have been seen off in this precise fashion, and we assume wily Unai Emery has the same fate in mind for Columbus Crew, RB Leipzig, Club America, Athletic Bilbao and Borussia Dortmund in what is an impressively packed and high-calibre pre-season schedule.

It’s a bold strategy, let’s see if it pays off for them.

Unofficial Arsenal officially strong
Always been weirdly invested in the precise point a pre-season friendly becomes an official pre-season friendly rather than an unofficial pre-season friendly. What, precisely, in fixtures that are all by definition unofficial is the difference between ‘Arsenal’ and an ‘Arsenal XI’?

Behind closed doors at a training ground rather than in front of fans at a stadium is a pretty reasonable way of separating the pre-season chaff from… the even chaffier pre-season chaff, but the one-step removed ‘Arsenal XI’ still feels a touch odd for a team as strong as the one Mikel Arteta selected to start a 2-0 win over Leyton Orient. Even the nature of the opponents – a local League One team – is firmly in legitimate pre-season friendly areas.

Jurrien Timber started, so already it had more actual centre-backs than the apparently official teams Tottenham have been picking, while Ben White, Martin Odegaard, Gabriel Jesus, Fabio Vieira, Thomas Partey, Reiss Nelson and Eddie Nketiah all began the game.

For a team obviously shorn of its summer-tournament stars, it feels more than worthy of full pre-season status.

NEXT: The full pre-season fixtures and results from all 20 Premier League clubs