By Tony Attwood
Last summer, the media correspondents who think they know it all told us in no uncertain terms that Arsenal needed a new centre forward. A 20-goal-a-season man. And indeed Arsenal went and bought him, and from that point on, the media moaned and moaned. Arsenal, we were told, had wasted their money. They have bought the wrong player, writing generally with the assumption that if Arsenal came along and said “we want your top goal scorer” every other team in every other league would bow down and say, “yes of course, he’s yours.” No club, it seemed, could possibly say no. Not to Arsenal.
So inevitably these journalists who are not clever enough to work for a football club, repeatedly knocked Arsenal and knocked the player. Arsenal’s recruitment staff and the managerial team were told that they were idiots and had bought the wrong player. Arsenal needed a 20-goal-a-year player, not a dilettante who drifted around the box and was more interested in getting his hair parted right than scoring.
He has now reached 21 games in all competitions this season, and I haven’t read a single retraction or apology. Hopefully, the club warned the player when they were negotiating what the English sports media is like, so he was prepared. But prepared he was, and the good news is he probably hasn’t stopped yet for this season, and next season, with the media carefully hiding all their anti-Gyokeres reports, some other player from some other club will get the treatment.
Of course, he has not yet shown £64m worth of value yet in his first season, and haqs not reached his 97 goals in a campaign that he got with his last club, for the simple reason that even Tottenham’s defence doesn’t play like a lower league Portuguese side Sporting. But he scored a penalty against Atletico Madrid in the Champions League semi-final, and not every penalty taker scores every high-pressure penalty.
But what about Arsenal, the non-scoring pretenders in the Premier League? Yes, we have played two more than ManC, but we have got six points more, a goal difference that is four goals better, we have scored more than them, and conceded three fewer. So of course, with two straight wins, they can overtake us, but the way some journalists have been writing it looks as if Arsenal are heading down rather than Tottenham, who incidentally have under half the points Arsenal have got, and have conceded over twice the number of goals that Arsenal have conceded this season.
One of the journalistic tricks in situations like this is to blame the earlier negativity on everyone else. As with the BBC headline, “Has much-maligned Gyokeres proved his critics wrong?” But the negativity was everywhere in the media, and indeed I still haven’t seen many articles pointing out that Arsenal is the top scoring team of this season with the defence that has conceded the fewest goals, and thus obviously has the best goal difference.
There is even a bit of positive news on the injury front, where Havertz and Odegaard are being assessed for the next match, rather than having no chance of playing. Which just leaves Timber and Mourinho out.
So next up on 5 May it is the second game against Atlético Madrid, and the following Sunday it is West Ham away, then all that is followed amazingly by an eight-day pause. I must go back and check that again, however, since that sounds more like the sort of thing the Mancs get rather than Arsenal!
But it does look as if, after the Atletico game, it is West Ham, Burnley, and Palace that Arsenal play. And during these longer pauses between games, the players (if they read the press) and we supporters can reflect on the fact that even our normally hounded players are getting some good reports. The Telegraph, for example, has “Sublime Saka rips apart Fulham in 45 minutes… then rests up for Atletico” and “Myles Lewis-Skelly grasps midfield chance having been made to wait by Mikel Arteta.”
Of course, they could then conclude that “being made to wait” was allowing the player to develop in training into what Arteta knew that Lewis-Skelly could be, but the Telegraph won’t have that adding, “Arsenal academy graduate’s performance against Fulham will leave fans wondering why he was not trusted centrally sooner.” No, it didn’t. I think we could see perfectly well.
Or to be more precise, it left me wondering how on earth Arteta knows just how long to leave players maturing in order to ensure their return is one that leaves all of us admiring what has happened, and leaves the journalists with egg on their faces for having demanded earlier returns.
But it was ever thus.
