All the 44 players Arsenal were tipped to sign in January, and the two we finally got.

And for your three minute insight, there’s The Untold Arsenal video

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By Sir Hardly Anyone

42 players tipped to be coming to Arsenal who did not.  Two players tipped to be coming, who did actually arrive.

Was that successful journalism?  Presumably yes since no one apologised, no one mentioned the gross failure of the journalists, and seemingly no one lost their job for being so incompetent.

Indeed in a sense that is what makes it so bad: these self-same people who tell us who is coming to Arsenal will all be at it again in the summer, and will probably have an even greater failure rate.

But for now it is over.  After all the screaming and shouting, the promises, the insider tips, we… got two players whom I suspect most of us had never heard of before, on loan.

Yet even up to the last the maniac scribblers were making it up with a frantic dedication that made us think that a team of medics should be on stand by at every publishing house.   The nonsense ranged from the Evening Standard’s

Arsenal ‘confirm’ Pablo Mari’s shirt number after January arrival

which led to a long debate about what the inverted commas around ‘confirm’ actually meant, through to

Fleck, Stones, Rodriguez – The five players Arsenal are tipped to sign on transfer deadline day

which told us that Football.London’s manic reporters were not only unable to tell us what was going to happen, but also could not count.

In the end the only people who got it right were the bookies who suspended betting on the actual signings for Arsenal a few hours before they signed, on loan.  Which left the scribblers telling us that Bellerin and Maitland Niles now had “competition” for the right back spot, although in reality it leaves AMN free to move back into his preferred midfield position and Bellerin can be rested at the first sign of a twinge.

Dayot Upamecano and Emre Can were there right up to the last, but nothing happened.

So we will remember this as the window in which sites started to devote whole articles to telling us we would sign someone, but not who, through to the window of desperation where even Zaha was given a second run out.

The journalists got it wrong.  44 players listed as coming, but only two arrived.  In any other trade, the people writing this guff would get the sack, but sadly not in football.   They are all still here still making up garbage, and soon they’ll be talking about the summer.