Ah, late August. It’s that time again: are you ready for some football?

No, not THAT football, English football! The Premiere League is underway, which means we get to look forward to 38 glorious rounds of matches stretching from now until next May.

But here’s the best part. There’s this guy named Barney Ronay. He’s the senior sportswriter at London’s Guardian newspaper. And each day throughout the season, he will dissect and illuminate and highlight and skewer aspects of the game using language so outrageous and colorful that…

We’d best let him speak for himself. And so, to get you ready for the NEW footie season, herewith are the top ten snippets of football journalism from LAST season, courtesy of perhaps the top sportswriter on the planet. (It’s best if you read it to yourself in an English accent.)

On ManCity winger RAHEEM STERLING: Neck straight, legs pumping, looking always slightly flustered, like a friendly bath-time rubber duck that has grown legs, learned to run around, and integrated itself successfully into human society but still feels terribly worried its cover may be blown at any moment.

On Arsenal manager ARSENE WENGER: Rather than cherished, brain selectively picked, Wenger is instead quietly mocked these days, cast as a cobwebbed crank, some doomed, sad stone knight still tending the hearth, a little creaky and mad, friends only with the flies and the beetles and the spiders.

On LEICESTER striker Jamie Vardy: This was a burp of playground-ish joy, the kind of goal that makes you want to shout words like CLANK! and WHUMP! and DID YOU SEE THAT!

On Chelsea bad-boy DIEGO COSTA: He achieved the rare feat of bringing pretty much the entire crowd inside this huge steel and glass bowl to its feet in a single cause, namely the offering of fruitless howls of displeasure in his direction.

On the TRANSFER WINDOW: Like gurning young clubbers turfed out into the morning light still throwing shapes to the beeping of the zebra crossing, it is a party out of thin air, a 24-hour rave around the planned termination of a prescribed commercial process.

On West Ham striker ANDY CARROLL: He picks out the flight of the ball so early, focused completely on the physics of that parabola of collision, moving past defenders who always seem somehow to be standing still, like people in a disaster movie transfixed by some CGI tornado looming up in the middle distance, sending cows and cars spiraling up into the clouds above the fields.

On commentator GLENN HODDLE: He has the right degree of absolute conviction that what he’s saying is almost dangerously important, offering his views insistently, sadly, devastatingly, like a man in a high-viz jacket who appears at the door late at night to tell you your dog’s been run over.

On Tottenham striker HARRY KANE: Here is a player who simply keeps on refusing to find his level, to plateau out, to look down and feel the first little twinge after five months of vertiginous ascent from bit-part midweek man to the most impressive English centre-forward currently playing.

On ManCity midfielder DAVID SILVA: A player who at times looks like the only grown-up on the pitch, all shifting, glancing angles, equations being solved, options reviewed and discarded like some prescient little time-traveling sprite.

On Liverpool manager JURGEN KLOPP: Those sudden cartwheeling appearances, grasping at the air, forming weird geometric shapes with his hands, a blur of teeth, glasses and quilted sportswear.

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There’s a full season of journalism genius waiting for you ahead, at https://www.theguardian.com/profile/barneyronay