Weekend Eye: Season's Tidings

The opening weekend of the Premier League is a bit like Christmas and New Year's Day rolled into one. You wait ages for it to come and get more and more excited as it approaches, but when it's come and gone it can leave you wondering why you bothered. The sheer levels of expectation that each new season brings are often enough to make even the most jaded and realistic of fans believe that their team can do better than they did the year before - a resolution that is often broken almost immediately.

For newly-promoted clubs, that sense of anticipation is all the more intense, as some of them have waited all their lives to kick off a season in the top flight. And then they get battered. By Bolton. Sure, Stoke's excitement must have been mingled with some dread, but there's always the hope of a miraculous first-day victory, like the one Hull City earned with Caleb Folan's goal against Fulham. Instead, Stoke lost 3-1 and some will be writing them off already.

That's another problem with the opening weekend of the season. After waiting so long for it to come, most people seem to lose all sense of perspective, taking a defeat to mean the end of the world, while a victory is a sign that this will be a good season, maybe even a great one. Of course, it really means nothing of the kind. Hull may have won a game and Stoke may have lost, but after one match, who really cares?