By Andi Thomas and Alexander Netherton

Are you an ostrich? Yes? Then get out, this diary is for humans only. The 2014/15 Premier League season in all its glory laid bare by two people who have packed this book with some jokes, not all of them funny. Written weekly with post-season footnotes exclusively added, this is Are You An Ostrich, you are reading a website, this is where you buy it. You’re welcome.

Author Bio

When not writing the Diary, Andi Thomas is a features writer for SB Nation Soccer. He has also written for the Mirror, Football 365, The Blizzard, The Score, In Bed With Maradona and other places. In 2012 he was named Blogger of the Year by the Football Supporters' Federation. Alexander Netherton is a football writer whose work has appeared in The Times, The Mirror, Eurosport and Football365.

Extract

If you are one of the few people who are reading it for the third successive season, hello to our mums and dads. If you are someone who is trying it for the first time, then I don’t care, Ian, you’ll never be anything more than a step-dad and pretending to be interested in my work isn’t going to make me like you.

The season has been, as the Chinese teacher Consensus decided, a boring one. This is because Chelsea won, and from the first few weekends it was always apparent that Chelsea would win the league. That’s boring if you watch football purely from the perspective on the football alone, and even then Chelsea were far more entertaining than people credit them for.

For the opening half of the season Chelsea obliterated teams with their organisation, pace, and ruthlessness. It was exciting football, it’s just that they were so good at it that the novelty wore off quickly, and the disappointment should not be with the season or Chelsea’s slip-off in the second half. It should be with Manchester City, Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool, who allowed them such an easy way to the title despite the wobble in the stodgy part of the season. But that doesn’t take into account most of the rest of the season. If you’re solely interested in the results, goals, tackles and the league table, that’s up to you, but there’s so much more of the season to be considered before you can properly call it boring.

You have Louis van Gaal bowling around the league with a near constant setting of belligerence to all in front, next to and behind him, making it up as he goes along and slapping Ryan Giggs in the face, all occasionally interrupted by some obviously sincere moments of being a pleasant man, such as toasting journalists at Christmas or celebrating his end of season party with a berserker performance. You have Brendan Rodgers, never knowingly not worth a joke at his expense as he buries himself under hubristic bullshit. You have Arsenal fans celebrating another year of winning the Calendar Year Title. You have Jose Mourinho flicking Vs and rekindling grand conspiracies. You have Manchester City, a charisma void of a club, doing PR for oil and gas money with a mixture of Innocent Smoothie Corporate speak and vast wealth. And lastly, you have Nigel Pearson, ruddy-faced, telling a journalist, “I think you are an ostrich.”

If you’re looking at the pitch and turning your nose up, you may have a point. If you’re experiencing the season as a whole and deciding that it’s boring, then Stuart Pearce, please stop reading now.