Football, the soap opera, the myths, and Arsenal’s remarkable progress

 

 

• How are our transfers doing? A first look at the 7 new boys
• Mikel Arteta and the benefit of having a complete clear out

By Tony Attwood

If you are kind enough to read Untold on a regular basis, or indeed if alternatively you often read the national media’s football pages, you may have noted how one of the charms of the media is that it constantly picks up on issues and makes a huge amount of the issue, and then drops the issue totally.   At the same time, other key factors are ignored, such as the inconsistency of referees, leading to data that shows some referees (for example) call many more fouls per match than others, some give many more penalties than others, some wave many more cards than others etc etc.

Meanwhile, alongside this underlying set of rules (such as “don’t criticise refs” but “do report transfer rumours without ever noting that 97% of them never come to fruition”) there is a secondary rule (or so it seems) not to talk about the way the media itself covers football.  The overall implication is that there is football “out there”, the important stories are the stories the media covers.  If it is not in the mainstream media (such as for example, issues with PGMO) then it is not important, or does not exist.

Therefore, the issue of fans getting worked up about referees is merely fan bias; the poor, uneducated fans not being able to see the game as clearly as the media can, because of the fans’ affection for one club, which gets in the way of their ability to judge what is going on. 

That is how it has been for years, of course.  Except that today the Mail has wandered off script with the headline, “No wonder Ange Postecoglou is under pressure – the Premier League has become a global soap opera of knee-jerk reactions, and the success of promoted teams has only fuelled the chaos”.   And given that the source of the soap opera of knee-jerk reactions is the media, that really is quite something.  Not “something” in the sense that they have published it, but something in the sense that we might believe it without thinking “who caused all this?”

Indeed, when you also read (from the same source) “Steven Gerrard reignites two-decade-long feud with former Liverpool team-mate who claimed ‘nobody’ at the Reds could ‘stand’ the ex-captain,” you know at once that trivia still reigns utterly supreme and nothing much is going on.

Even the occasional attempt to use statistics generally looks stale and old hat.   As with “Revealed: Alternative Premier League table shows how much WORSE Manchester United have been under Ruben Amorim this season.”

For this “alternative league table” is of the type we have been regularly publishing for years, in which we compare Arsenal’s position now with where it was a year ago, two years ago etc etc.  It’s not really an “alternative league table” but rather a simple historical comparison chart which can give a bit of extra insight.   

But still they want to make their point, which quite simply is just that, “Manchester United are four points worse off after seven fixtures this season than they were at the same point a year ago, an alternative comparison table has revealed.” 

However, it is not just the Mail that plays around in this way, for the Telegraph wants to stir up things on our territory by running the headline “Arsenal fans are split on Viktor Gyokeres and here is why”

The “why” is that he has not scored in six games, although as the paper admits, “his movement and industry have been praised by Mikel Arteta and Bukayo Saka”

And of course, elsewhere there is the league table which shows that Arsenal have the most points, have scored the second highest number of goals (just one below ManC with the Haaland who has scored nine with no one lese scoring more than one – what will they do if he gets injured?) and have the best defence, and the best goal difference of any club.  One might also point out that Liverpool has conceded three times as many goals as Arsenal, and that last season, after seven games Arsenal were actually doing better than now (largely due to the very biased fixture list this season).

In fact, it was in league games eight to eleven that the first of Arsenal’s “dips” that we wrote about so much last season happened.  That run involved away defeats to Bournemouth and Newcastle and draws with Liverpool and Chelsea.   As we have tried to suggest before, it is getting rid of those dips, where a long run of victories is replaced by a short run of draws and defeats, that is the key to winning to league.