EPL Players to Watch

Most major European soccer leagues either began their domestic competition this past weekend or are kicking if off this coming weekend. The biggest of them all, the English Premier League (Barclay's is insistent on calling it the BPL, but they're not paying me) kicks off this Saturday and Sunday.

There was a flurry of action this off-season and plenty of transfers to speak of. With that in mind I thought I'd offer up a look at some players to keep an eye on. Even a couple of the EPL doormats (so to speak) have made some moves in an effort to be more competitive and perhaps become this year's Portsmouth (P'mouth was around the top of the table for about half the season), if not pull a surprise and make a run similar to Sevilla's in Spain last year.

Obafemi Martins


Martins is one of my favorite players. Whenever he takes the field you can pretty much bank on him being the fastest player out there. Even though injured a good part of last season he still managed to score double digits in goals, and none more spectacular than his strike at about the 2:30 mark in the video above, which was perfectly placed at a blistering 86mph. If Michael Owen can successfully return from his own bout with injury, Newcastle is going to have a hell of a front line for defenders to contend with. Signing Onyewu and getting rid of Bramble in the back line should help out their miserable defense...look for Martins to be running by opponents all year long.

Martin Petrov

Petrov is a speedy winger coming to Manchester City from Spanish club Atletico Madrid. Petrov also had a spell with Barcelona as well as time in Germany. The reason I think he's someone to watch is mostly because new City manager Sven is adding some real pieces to a City side that was pretty lackluster this past season. If Petrov's fellow Bulgarian, striker Bojinov, manages to land at City look for some pretty interesting Manchester derbies this season. Manchester United won't just be able to walk over the improved City side.

Florent Malouda


Possibly Chelsea's biggest acquisition this off-season was French international and striker/winger Florent Malouda. He starred at French juggernaut Lyon this past season and also looked very much on form at the World Cup in Germany this past summer. He's already proven his stuff for the Blues in pre-season matches and should work well with Drogba and Shevchenko up front.

Fernando Torres


Here's the rundown:

1) He's Spanish
2) He's apparently good looking (though he does look a bit like one of the guys in those Cal Ripken insurance commercials)
3) He's really good at scoring goals
4) He has "Torres" tattooed on his arm...in Tolkien Elvish?

I'll let #4 pass because the appropriately nicknamed "El Nino" is a beast up front and is a MASSIVE upgrade over the (thankfully) departed Craig Bellamy for Liverpool.

Eduardo da Silva


Let's face it, nobody can replace Thierry Henry at Arsenal. Wenger went out and signed this Croatian/Brazilian striker da Silva. He looks like a quality finisher but it's yet to be seen if he'll be able to help the young Gunners stick to the top of the table or if they'll just be a "work in progress" yet again.

Welcome...please disregard the smell

Welcome to PGD. The title for this thing came about from a...er, "meeting of minds". Basically JB and I were talking about names for our blog, fresh off the stink of a discussion about shitting. I was catharthisizing (this is not a word, instincts and Firefox 2.0 tell me so) about my need for a venue to vent about all the idiots/retards/D.C motorists I'm exposed to each day. Realizing that much of our discussion revolves around sports and more recently how to sooth the blueballing resulting from enhanced College Football coverage with no actual CFB to watch, we settled on a semi-sports themed blog.

But as with all good blogs written by people with the correct balance of chromosomes, we can't just limit ourselves to sports, even though we're two of the biggest sports fans we know. And frankly there are just too fucking many stupid people out there that I need to touch upon that ostensibly have nothing to do with sports (though most of them nearly hitting me with their cars on Florida Ave. are likely Redskins fans).

The title really reflects a few things:

1) Guys talk about poop (more on my fecal theories to come).
2) Pre-game rituals are universal and loosely ties into a semi-sports theme.
3) Though we've no aversion to reporting things that are awesome, anybody with the slightest clue knows this: the world fucking sucks, people are stupid, and E!SPN is clueless. Therefore we will be commenting on quite a few shitty things, verbally dumping on people, etc.

That being said there's really nothing off limits here: Sports (obviously), TV, movies, pop culture, video games, personal life accounts (I'm sure you're thrilled), bitching about work, bitching about traffic, bitching about RFK Stadium, chronicling my morbidly hilarious attempts to find a girlfriend. You get the idea.

This will be updated fairly often and expect it to pick up momentum once football (America, European, Australian alike) season kicks into gear.