The Premier League's flying ball carriers are breathing new life into the elite game | first division

the first division It has become more exciting. And that's okay, really. For the most reticent among us it may be difficult to take this at face value, if only because the league is always telling you how exciting it already is, the regular in-house TV presenters designing the entire experience with the glassy, ​​proselytizing gaze of Presenters of shopping channels trying to sell you a basket of executive cheese.

But sometimes the cheese basket is just good. Gaming is exciting right now. The average level of the teams is high. Financial power, improved scouting, and the presence of informed global data nerds mean that even the weakest teams are littered with astonishingly good football hyper-athletes. Ah yes, a club that was recently in League One and is represented on the field by men who appear to have been dishonorably discharged from the navy. It seems you've signed a 21-year-old Paraguayan genius made entirely of elastic and feathers.

Teams that lose games are losing games in interesting ways. Bournemouth appear to be in a state of sustained emotional turmoil, a team that plays at all times as if being chased by a cloud of bees. Tottenham may be disappointing and destined to finish seventh, but they will still end up a disappointing seventh in the loosest way possible.

This seems significant, because the Premier League has recently gone through a boring patch. Much of the last two seasons involved staring at one end of the pitch while a nimble, bouncing goalkeeper performed a series of pirouettes and Cruyff became bait for a wary opposition press.

And in front of this, an increasingly boring formula: central defenders reconfigured as playmakers, wingers transformed into pressing machines, attacks that feel like they have been constructed through a 12-step Ikea booklet. Losing against Manchester City was like being murdered very slowly with a pair of knitting needles.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Boredom is a vital base note in football. And it's certainly been more boring than this in the past. I remember watching Wimbledon play at Selhurst Park on one of those days when it's so cold the air hurts, when throughout the match basically the Wimbledon goalkeeper, Paul Heald, was pausing, fiddling with his tracksuit bottoms, He looked distressed, then took off on a 17-step sprint and smashed the ball downfield with astonishing force, his boot making an incredible noise each time, like a wet fish slammed against a dock wall.

This was just before football became genuinely fun, the early Premier League era of handsome, scoundrel players in oversized shirts and shiny, flowing hair. The game reinvents itself even when it seems set. The current enthusiasm is related to something that may or may not have a lasting effect. But there is a new kind of energy in the place. And also a new favorite type of footballer: the Impact Runner.

These still, to a large extent, go unnoticed as a collective type. Its emergence is due to a tactical problem posed by the way many stronger teams control the game. How do you attack or try to move upfield effectively when your opponents have 63% possession? How do you fight choke from a well-built high block? How do you overcome a pattern of spending long periods defending yourself as the last humans walled inside a zombie shelter at the end of the pier?

Players who can carry the ball with speed and power are, it seems, an attempt to alter this. The closest metric to measure his impact is not the counterattack, but the more opaque “carry.” In reality, there is still no name for this type of player. The fire ship. The siege machine. The transitionist. The man who runs with bulging thighs and the ball. But they do help create interesting patterns and also showcase some really good players on teams that would otherwise struggle.

Wolves can be riddled with bugs. Gary O'Neil can seem at all times as if he just found out he lost the dog in a grueling 10-year divorce hearing. But the good moments of this season have still shown how brilliant the footballer Matheus Cunha is, right up there with the best carriers in the league alongside Anthony Elanga, Liam Delap, Adama Traoré, Tyler Dibling and Kevin Schade.

Some of them are wingers who run from deep, often in a way that is not designed to make a cross but to move the entire line of play up, like rugby league players running towards contact. And once you start looking, you realize that there are young players emerging in the top flight with really unusual qualities.

It is probably necessary to see Delap in his visceral flesh and with his calves flexed to appreciate how exciting he is, a 21-year-old in a team that cannot win and who is still allowed to take risks, apply his skill to advance. . The same goes for Dibling, a really good young footballer whose ball-carrying style is a kind of football parkour, jumping over bollards, swinging between car bonnets, cartwheeling over a group of community support officers.

It's tempting to wonder how players like this will adapt to being lured to stronger teams. Counterattacking and running power made you a star. Now go and do it on a team that spends its entire existence trying to poke tiny holes in a wall of flesh 20 yards from the goal.

But there are ball carriers higher up the league. This is another fun thing about this game pattern. It is linked, as everything must be now, with Manchester City's current agonies. It's been tempting to see cultural decline, the end of times, and the death of an era in that losing streak, because all of those things are attractive in a narrative sense.

Maybe it's tactical too. The managers have noticed that City is vulnerable to the ball passing through the center of the field. Every team they have fought against has this ability. The oscillation began with the 3-2 victory at Fulhamwhen Traoré realized he could simply dash across the field, traumatizing anything in his path. Dejan Kulusevski pierced City in Spurs' 4-0 win. Ryan Gravenberch was hugely impressive last weekendand then Darwin Núñez gave Rúben Dias a terrible time, snorting at his back, stamping his hooves, rearing up on his hind legs.

This probably won't save many teams further down the league. But it's undeniably exciting to watch, and also a reminder that there are always new shapes and forms. The fear with football is always that it will sell out, that it will become a high-spec, homogenized product, that we will simply run out of it.

And yet, somehow elite play remains remarkably resilient. Stretch it, microanalyze every possible defensive throw-in combination. It will continue to draw you in, expelling you from the teenage bargaining machines, a majestically rising South America, the thigh-waving rise of the Carry-Merchant.