- PSG’s performance and financial successes in Europe of late.
- Now the season is over, what can the authorities do about the past
By Tony Attwood
There was apparently an argument going on about whether Piers Morgan should have been able to join in Arsenal celebrations in relation to winning the league title. Morgan has made his money out of being hypercritical and controversial, so his sneaking into an Arsenal celebration should have come as no surprise to anyone.
But then, neither should the protests, since both the sneaking in and the subsequent protests gave Morgan the one thing he wants more than any other… which is publicity about himself. One journalist once told me his middle name was “me”, and that seems about right.
Obviously, it is up to each individual if he or she wishes to give Morgan that publicity. If you dislike the man, then don’t read anything he writes. If you dislike him a lot, don’t read any newspaper or website that he writes for. If enough people follow you, then those who pay him will realise that paying the man only reduces their readership, and so they’ll stop employing him, and he will sink.
Sinking in fact, is what he will do, for people like this only exist for publicity. If they don’t get it, out they go.
I would suggest, however, that blogs like this one are different. Untold will exist as long as I feel like keeping it going, and at the moment, I feel it is worth keeping going simply because there are so few outlets of any type that think that fundamentally Arsenal are doing very well. Read the media over an average weekend during the season and what you will find is the reserve – criticisms of the club and the way that it is run.
Now as I have mentioned before, the people who write about football are those who either have never played or managed a club, or who have played or managed but actually not done very well at either job and so now need to write something (or just as commonly, employ a ghost writer becausse they are not very good at the writing lark) and earn some cash that way.
Lurking behind all this is the notion that somehow us supporters are not bright enough to watch, understand and maybe interpret football without the help of “experts”. But in such a case, it is worth asking, who are these experts? Are they managers? Clearly not, because if they were managers, they would not have any time to write about football. Are they players – normally no, for the very same reason.
They are, in fact, for the most part, people who are paid to write or (if as is quite often the case, they are not very good at writing) who can put their name to something critical that they have no written.
Now it is, of course, true that I spend a few hours each week writing about Arsenal. I started doing this because I found myself endlessly disagreeing with what was in the newspapers, on other blogs and also on the broadcast media. Which is why I called it “Untold Arsenal” – it would reflect what I felt (and as it turned out, what lots of other people felt), which was not being reported in the media at large.
During the years we’ve been running, the media at large has carried on along its own route of battering Arsenal (and I am sure you are still able to remember the way the medai wrote about Arsenal this season up to about the last couple of months of the season when it beame clear to even the dopiest of journalists and editors that this Arsenal team was not going to give up and fade away, but was actually going to cointinue its journey.
After all, under Arteta, the seasons have finished with Arsenal in 8th, 8th, 5th, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd. And then finally the title.
Now you may have seen people calling for Arteta to go, saying he didn’t have a winning mentality, and that three second-place finishes were not enough. But really, such people should at least study a little bit of the history of the club they claim to support. And if they did, they might remember 1998/9, 1999/2000, and 2000/01 in which we came second, second and well, not to put too fine a point on it, second. Then we came, in the following four seasons, first, second, first, second.
You might recall the name of our centre forward at the time. A certain Thierry Henry.
