Defending it is a completely different job

Season opener · August 2026

Twenty-two years is a long time to spend explaining to people why the wait was nearly over. Now it is over, and the strange thing nobody warns you about is that winning the thing does not make the next season easier. It makes it louder. Every draw is a wobble. Every substitution is a referendum. Every set-piece conceded gets its own six-minute segment on a channel you have never heard of.

The squad is better than the one that won it. Bruno Guimarães walking into a midfield that already had Zubimendi, Rice and Ødegaard is faintly obscene. Tzolis gives us a left side that does not depend on one man's hamstring. Hincapié is permanent. Meslier is a free goalkeeper who has played a hundred Premier League games. This is what a club looks like when it has stopped being sentimental about the gaps.

What we are actually watching for this year is whether the standards hold when the motivation changes. Chasing is easy. Being chased is the test.

In defence of the captain, again, forever

On Martin Ødegaard

Every eighteen months the discourse cycles back to whether the armband should move. It is always framed as a compliment to Declan Rice, which is a neat trick, because it means anyone defending Ødegaard sounds like they are attacking a player everyone loves.

So let's be plain about it. Captaincy at this club, under this manager, is not about who wins the most duels. It is about who holds the shape of the idea when the game is going badly — who keeps demanding the ball in the pocket at 0-0 away from home in the 71st minute when the easy thing is to hide. He does that in games where his numbers look ordinary. That is precisely the point.

Also he scored in the opener and the shot took a deflection, which is the most Ødegaard sentence ever written.

A word on watching this from 16,000km away

The Brisbane clause

There is a specific kind of supporter who has never once walked up Drayton Park but can tell you exactly what the away kit looked like in 2011 because they were awake at 2am to see it. That is most of us out here. The fixture list is not a fixture list, it is a sleep schedule, and a 3pm Saturday in London is midnight on Sunday morning in Queensland.

So this site puts the Brisbane time next to every kick-off, and flags the ones that land between 1am and 6am — the genuinely brutal ones, where you either commit or you spend Sunday morning dodging the score. Both are respectable choices. Only one of them is correct.