By Tony Attwood
I
magine you believed that the universe was controlled by the giant spaghetti monster in the sky.
If you did you wouldn’t be alone, because you’d be accompanied by tens of thousands of followers of the same belief. They are known as the pastafarians and indeed you could, if you wished, become a member of the cult. It used to cost $2 although to become an ordained minister, although the price may have gone up since then.
But then supposing one day you found out to your horror that the Giant Spaghetti Monster was just a hoax. You’d been telling everyone that the monster existed and controlled all our destinies, and yet now it seems you were wrong. What would you do?
You would in fact have several choices. You could…
a) Go very quiet, not publish or say anything, and perhaps move to a remote Scottish island.
b) Claim it is all a joke, and that you knew that all the time that your assertions were wrong, and that you are amazed that so many people believed you.
c) Just carry on believing but in a rather quiet way hoping that no one noticed.
d) Claim the nay-sayers and deniers are all going to get their comeuppance one day soon and then they’ll be sorry.
Now I mention this today because this is the dilemma that football journalists and bloggers have been facing in relation to Arsenal. They have told us that in their strange fake reality
- Arsenal had an awful season last season
- There was no improvement in the latter part of the season
- Nothing in terms of tactics that was of consequence happened at Arsenal last season
- The only solution to Arsenal’s problems is to buy lots of new players.
- Nothing here has anything to do with referees.
OK so now you are thinking, “oh for f***’s sake Attwood, you’ve rammed this down our throat enough. Give it a rest.”
And yes I am going to give it a rest. Absolutely. Because…
We’ve got a new set of data with even more extraordinary findings
We’ve just finished a whole new set of analyses about what has been happening to Arsenal and these figures show us another factor in Arsenal’s play which has never, ever been mentioned by us or anyone else.
It concerns Arsenal, it concerns referees, and it concerns the rest of the Premier League.
Now we are having our final meeting to go over the figures on Friday, and after that I’ll be ready to put them out, but believe me from what I have seen so far, they really do add another insight into why Mr Arteta has been forced into the radical action of the “Don’t Tackle” approach to football.
Until now the media has universally adopted the position of continuing to believe that our figures don’t exist. That the change in away wins in crowdless stadia is false. That Arsenal’s abandonment of tackling totally transformed what referees could do to them last season is nonsense. That a small cabal of referees were handing out yellows to Arsenal at a much higher rate than other referees – and these “high card” refs were given Arsenal games over and over again, is typical Untold Arsenal fantasy.
But as anyone can see from the official figures, Arsenal were the second best team in the league through the last two thirds of last season, in terms of league position, goals scored and goals conceded.
Of course when changes of this magnitude occur there are bound to be other statistics lurking around, but it needs time and determination to find them. And I am so grateful to my pals who have become so fascinated by these findings that they have been willing to plough through tons of data to find out exactly what is going on.
Now we know the media are going to ignore these figures, and going to continue to tell us that Arsenal are going to buy multiple players. And then we’ll be told it has been another failed transfer window when the big names don’t arrive.
But at least us Arsenal supporting pastafarians have got something else up our sleeves – or we would have if we weren’t all wearing sleeveless t-shirts because of the heat.
The Key Data Tables 2020/21 revealing how Arsenal changed tactics
