Athletic: if you a commenting on the law, please look at the law

By Tony Attwood

We have had seven domestic cup ties without defeat.  In our last 11 games of last season we won eight, lost one drew two.   This season it is four straight wins (five if you include the FL Trophy victory).  But let’s leave that one out.  We are currently on six straight wins, starting with Arsenal 3 Watford 2 in the league and taking in the Cup Final against Chelsea, the Community Shield against Liverpool, a couple of Premier League wins and the League Cup game last night.

Now I have heard people sneer at all of these stats, and most particularly say that nothing can be learned from a match that included the up and coming youngsters such as Willock, Nketiah, Saka, and Nelson, but I see it the other way round.  They look really good to me, and these are the players we are going to need as the tacklers and cloggers get their boots into Arsenal in the coming months.

It was interesting however that even here, neither Mesut Özil nor Matteo Guendouzi could get a game.  It seems the future remains dark for both.  Mind you we can still have a laugh thinking back to the Mail’s headline from last May concerning Arsenal, “Under Stan Kroenke they’ve become a selling club so why will it be any different for Mikel Arteta?”

That seems rather ironic when they are still at the club.

Of course the media point out that the first goal was an own goal, a freak goal, an unlucky goal, and yep perhaps it was all of that but you get those goals by pressurising and taking your chances and that is what Arsenal did.

And meanwhile Héctor Bellerín showed why he should not to sold by setting up the second for Eddie who stayed calm and got it right.

However it was not all beauty and light yesterday as Athletic News have been having another bash at Arsenal.  They start out by reporting the Premier League’s recent statement that English football is losing more than £100 million a month while other clubs are spending huge amounts of money on players.

It is a valid point and a worthy debate, except that they then set it up by writing of “how, for example…  Arsenal can celebrate Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s new £250,000-a-week contract so soon after making 55 employees redundant.”

As I’ve pointed out before, UK law is quite clear that people can only be made redundant because their jobs no longer exist.  Which is to say that there is no work for them.  They can’t be sacked simply because the company wants to save some money or doesn’t like those individuals and wants them replaced.

So for example if you owned a whole set of apple tree orchards in Somerset, and most of the trees got a blight which meant that the trees all died, you could make your staff redundant because quite obviously there is no work to do.  If you thought the apple pickers were annoying people always moaning and wanting more money, you couldn’t make them “redundant” and replace them.

Thus we discussed on this site the issue issue of how Arsenal will find new players without these people who travel Europe looking for local talent, and how they have been replaced by StatDNA and the new boot-based technology that allows clubs to monitor exactly the performances of the players without the need to wear the cumbersome undershirt wrap-arounds that many players so dislike.

But the Athletic will have none of this.  Instead they seize another chance to knock Arsenal.  True, they mention in passing Chelsea’s expenditure and Tottenham’s salary for Bale (but mitigating that with the fact that Real Mad will pay over half of it), but as ever it is Arsenal that is included with false comparisons, simply because we are Arsenal.

Yes as they say, “The Athletic revealed in May that over a 15-year period [Manchester] United have paid around £1.5 billion in interest payments, bond buybacks, management fees, dividends and all the other costs that come with the dubious privilege of being owned by the Glazer family.”  But they didn’t go on and mention the killer fact that the “B” shareholders in Man U (the family owners) are guaranteed their dividend each year no matter how well or badly the club does.

If we really want to worry about Arsenal, it is the Trump supporting owners we ought to worry about – and this is something the media are reluctant to cover.   For example how does it feel to have our club owned by a man who believes in the Nazi theory of eugenics?   If you have not come across this before take a look at the commentary on a speech by Trump reported this week in Rolling Stone.  Oh and incidentally if you have a feeling that Rolling Stone is just a rock n roll magazine this article might help re-shape your views.

And yes, before anyone mentions it, they did do a nice little bit about me tucked away within an article a while back in relation to the Untold Dylan site, but that really was small, and what they are saying about Trump is big.  Try it.  It is frightening.