LETTING SLIDE
Sanchez is still starting and somehow we are still surprised
I have watched Davinson Sanchez start another Premier League game for Tottenham and I am fairly certain I am the only person in Britain who wants to talk about it. The lineups land, the camera finds him, the match goes ahead, and by full time we are arguing about someone else. I am not having it this week. I am writing the column.
The line that nobody questions
I opened the team sheet on Sunday and there he was. Sanchez, partner to whichever centre half De Zerbi currently trusts, doing the job he has done in patches for us since the day we bought him. He has had the kind of career at Spurs that lends itself to a thousand think pieces and yet nobody has written a single one. He is the footballer equivalent of that one kitchen cupboard you open every day and never think to clean, except the cupboard keeps winning his headers and starting the build up with a pass that actually reaches a shirt of the same colour.
The most striking thing is not that he is playing. It is that the discourse has agreed, without ever discussing it, that his selection is not a story. A foreign centre half, on big wages, into his thirties, starting in a back four that is supposed to be learning a new system, and we have collectively shrugged. I refuse to shrug. Cross the squad list, work through the back four on the graphic the club still insists on publishing, and his name is the one constant on every line. If a journalist can write a season preview about the loan kid who has started twice, they can write a paragraph about the man who has started eleven.
What he is actually doing on the pitch
Strip the noise away and look at the numbers. Sanchez is clearing more than two and a half duels per ninety, leading our second most common passing lane out of defence, and winning more headers than both Dragusin and the loan kid we keep bringing on for the last ten. None of that is the point, of course. The point is that he is doing it without a single banner or a single stat graphic on the BBC and that should tell you everything about how Spurs coverage actually works, which is that it rewards novelty and punishes anything that looks like graft.
He is also the only one who keeps stepping into the kind of fixtures where the rest of the back line develops a sudden injury. I counted four last month. Four. He did not ask for the noise, he just turned up and did it, and then we all went home and wrote about the new boy. Take last Saturday as a worked example. Romero pulled out in the warm up, the back four was reshuffled on the team sheet in front of me, and Sanchez moved across one slot and put in a clean first half that any of his younger partners would have been given a column for. He got a passing mention in the match report, a passing mention, and that was our lot.
Why we are not allowed to notice
There is a rule in English football commentary that a player who has been at a club for more than four seasons becomes scenery. You can be brilliant or awful, the rule does not care, you simply stop existing. Sanchez has crossed that line and the coverage has obeyed the rule to the letter, and the rule will outlast every manager we hire between now and whenever the club finally does the clear out it keeps hinting at in the programme notes.
I have come to think the silence is itself the story. A club that watches its own player and then refuses to say what it is watching is a club that has stopped doing its own thinking, and the fans are not supposed to notice that either. We are noticing. We are writing it down. You can read it on a blog with my name on it and that, for now, will have to do. Until the next centre half gets injured, or the next young thing arrives from abroad, or the next manager decides he fancies a change, Sanchez will keep starting, keep heading it clear, keep starting the pass, and keep being talked about by precisely nobody, and the rest of us will keep pretending that is normal.