By Tony Attwood
Part of my work as the lead writer of Untold Arsenal is to have a read of as wide a range of articles and commentaries each day, as I can manage, which appear in the media and which in some way or other relate to Arsenal. Not to copy any of them (at least I hope not) but to get a feel of what is being discussed by Arsenal fans at large. But also, because we are “Untold,” to avoid the topics others are writing about, unless we have something new or different to say.
And of course this means taking on board articles that suggest that all is not well with refereeing, in the sense that some clubs are helped by referees and their assistants, while others are hindered.
Now I have not done a statistical analysis of which clubs seem to be harmed the most by wrongful decisions, because I am not sure the data would be accurate – and it would take up a lot of time. Arsenal fans would see referees get things wrong in terms of Arsenal, Chelsea fans in terms of Chelsea and so on.
In fact the only way we could really get some information would be to have a panel of unbiased experts watching the referee’s behaviour in matches – and we don’t have the resources for that.
So I am left with looking at the commentaries on the internet and I would suggest that something between a third and a half of clubs in the Premier League have fans who strongly believe that their club is being hampered by referees through persistent wrong decisions. Which leaves us thinking that either most referees are constantly making mistakes, which is rather worrying.
But although I think that the media have decided en masse to lay off the topic of referee errors, the media can on occasion give us a bit of unexpected observation, or even a spot of fun concerning what is happens in the Premier League. Take for example the headline today in the Guardian...
“Manchester’s soulless content machine football clubs sum up post-imperial Britain”
And I pick this out because the sub-heading does goes us a further insight into the reporting of referees. It reads… “United and City dominate the news cycle with stories so strange and vast they threaten to consume the rest of the league.”
Meanwhile I see the stories about Arsenal being hampered by biased and/or incompetent referees strange. Strange in the sense that if it is true, why are they doing it, and how are they getting away with it? And strange in the sense that week after week these stories appear in the blogs, yet the media never once pick them up. Strange in the sense that PGMO are getting away with it all the time, and the media and the game in general are just letting it pass them by. And strange because around half the clubs in the PL have supporters who truly believe that their clubs are losing matches because of referee bias against their particular club.
Barney Ronay – who is actually the chief sports writer of the Guardian, describes the Arsenal match as a “deeply disturbing two-hour public meditation on the meaning of faith, blood, fear, power, ritual and the fetishising of objects, climaxing in an orgiastic crowd scene of depraved but undeniably erotic abandon, all acted out on a set in a state of glorious and performative ruin.” I saw the game, and from what I saw he could be right – you might have caught some of it; it was a 4-4 draw.
So what is going on in the city? ManC have been found guilty of almost every crime they are accused of, but still deny every single offence with a statement that the evidence clearing them is obvious – it is just that we refuse to see it. And they are losing games. ManU haven’t bothered with the first part – they have just gone straight to losing games, despite having won the second most number of English league titles.
So from regular winners, each glorified ceaselessly by the English media these two clubs have fallen into a cesspit of failure, cheating and despair. Seemingly in the space of a few months. How did that happen? I mean, it really is more like a bad movie with an obvious plot, than reality.
The point of course, is that the media cannot admit that for years they have lapped up everything that the C’s and the U’s have done, ignoring the achievements of most other clubs, ignoring the fact that most of their readership, rather than being C or U supporters actually loathe both clubs. So they have to act surprised, as if they didn’t know both were coming.
OK we might not have expected that both clubs in the city would collapse at the same time, but I think most of us knew it couldn’t last forever; that something fishy was gong on, and one day it would all fall apart.
Of course in one sense the C and the U have enjoyed it, for the feeling we’ve had for years is that they didn’t really care what happened in football as long as Manchester dominated the news – which it still does. Arsenal top of the league can hardly get a word in. And even more amusingly, even though Untold has often pointed out that the best way to ensure you slip down the league is to change managers, the clubs have been changing managers.
All we can say is “go for it lads”. There’s another 40 or so unemployed ex-managers out there waiting for your call. For with these clubs, the managers are not important any more, not in the way that Arteta is important at Arsenal at least. There is Arsenal with the model of how to find, appoint and hold on to a manager (even when he takes the club down to eighth) and allows him to work the club upwards, even when one of their rivals is fiddling the books as they have never been fiddled before.
Even the media has got it now, as the Guardian describes the senior staff at ManU as “bit-part players, useful idiots for the regime: the director of football,” citing Jason Wilcox as looking like “a bit more like an office clerk trapped inside a hijacked foreign embassy trying to signal desperately with his eyes that he’s close to the edge and can someone in a flak jacket please appear at the fire escape window pretty soon.” I wish I’d thought of that.
And then tucked away in the article about ManU the Guardian comes up with another phrase that we have been looking for, and the phrase that I wish I had found first. For they speak of owners “whose only addition to the spectacle is to demonstrate the non‑transferable skills of the average billionaire.”
I agree – although I would add that this is what Arsenal don’t have – the “average billionaire”. Because Arsenal, having appointed a manager who could waste most of the transfer budget on a player who they eventually had to get rid of by giving him away, found a man who does know football. So while “United are trapped in a cycle of self‑consumption” Arsenal are growing into a new era of expansion and dominance.
Of course that last comment is the bit that most of the media types don’t get, because they are wallowing in their new found fun of knocking MnaU, while we’ve been doing it for years. Indeed I am wondering if they might not have picked up some of our ManU comments from the past, but even if so I guess that’s ok. They need to get their phraseology from somewhere.
