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Slowly, very slowly, Uefa is making football slightly more balanced and equal
- And how we got a prediction right: Leeds v Arsenal – and for once it is not on TV, but it could be goals a plenty
By Tony Attwood
“Arsenal get back on track” says the Guardian. A modest response, but accurate in its own way.
Football clubs are killing football pubs says the Telegraph, having previously run “fans and players feeling the pressure” I am not sure I did, but then I doubt that the paper is written with me in mind.
Brawl at the Bridge! says the Mail, which always likes to go with the violence when there is football news to be had. They add “West Ham star is sent off for grabbing Joao Pedro by the THROAT in stoppage time, sparking 22-man melee as visitors lose their heads.” (That’s their capitalisation not mine – their sub editors really are curious people).
But I guess we can let them go down their own wretched pathway,s while we take a quick peek at, well, not to put too fine a point on it, the table… Tottenham it seems, are now 25 points behind Arsenal after 23 games with a 27 lower goal difference. That’s quite a lot, really.
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arsenal | 24 | 16 | 5 | 3 | 46 | 17 | 29 | 53 |
| 2 | Manchester City | 23 | 14 | 4 | 5 | 47 | 21 | 26 | 46 |
| 3 | Aston Villa | 23 | 14 | 4 | 5 | 35 | 25 | 10 | 46 |
| 4 | Chelsea | 24 | 11 | 7 | 6 | 42 | 27 | 15 | 40 |
| 5 | Liverpool | 24 | 11 | 6 | 7 | 39 | 33 | 6 | 39 |
| 6 | Manchester United | 23 | 10 | 8 | 5 | 41 | 34 | 7 | 38 |
| 14 | Tottenham Hotspur | 23 | 7 | 7 | 9 | 33 | 31 | 2 | 28 |
Of course, the second and third place clubs can still catch up a bit with their one game in hand, but on the other hand, even having played a game more, Arsenal are still the best defensive team in the league.
But Tottenham are getting a spot more attention these days as the Mail has them in their sites for one of its long headlines: “Inside Toxic Tottenham’s horror season: Why fans think they’re ‘sleepwalking’ to relegation, the ‘financial Armageddon’ if they do drop, who would be sold, what rivals think of Fabio Paratici shambles and why.”
And maybe we should spare a thought for Weest Ham. They go ten games within out win (mostly defeats actually) and then get their three wins in a row, although including one against Tottenham Hots which I suppose doesn’t really count, and then after all that, lose to Chelsea! Mind you, the Mail calls the latest Chelsea game Brawl at the Bridge! with the story of a “22-man melee as visitors lose their heads” which sounds careless.
So really, it is pretty much football as usual. And we still have Tottenham Hots v Manchester City to look forward to. I guess it is one of those games where we shout at the TV in favour of Tottenham, and then fail to do us any favours. But you never know. Maybe this can be the day when they discover what football is actually about.
Still, at least the Guardian has the decency to admit that, “Two points from three games is hardly compelling enough evidence to prompt full-blown crisis talks,” although it would have shown a bit more balance had they mentioned that beforfe yesterday’s game.
So what is the big football news today? According to the Telegraph, “There is too much football on TV.”
Which is a bit of an odd thing to say in that the only way to measure that is with statistics that show that crowd figures are declining and/or TV audience figures are declining. And they are not.
So what comes next?
For Arsenal, it is Chelsea at home in the League Cup (you might recall we are 2-3 up on that one from the first leg, which took place six matches ago), and then in the league it is Sunderland away. Sunderland at the time of writing, have only won three of their last 11 games. That Sunderland game in on Saturday, 7th, and again is at 3pm, which seems to suggest that the TV stations have had enough of us for a while.
As for Chelsea, since losing to Arsenal in the League Cup they have had five straight wins in the Premier League and the Champions League. They were in fact one of the five Premier League teams that made it into the next round proper in the Champions League without having to play in the play-offs (in which Newcastle are the only English representative).
Uefa is said to be outraged at the fact that there are five English clubs that have automatically gone through to the next round proper and are having urgent meetings to discuss how to stop this happening next year. Their big concern is that the money spinners in terms of TV audiences (from which Uefa makes some of its mountains of profit) will not include the likes of Real Madrid, Inter Milan, PSG, Juventus and Atletico Madrid, all of whom are in the knockout extra round that Arsenal and all the other English clubs except Newcastle have missed out on.
As they are urgently discussing, match fixing is all very good, as long as the right matches are fixed in the right way. It was never meant to put the Champions League future of those five Euro giants in peril this early in the competition.
