Why can’t the media admit Arsenal were wonderful on Sunday?

By Tony Attwood

As we know, the media find it impossible to admit that Arsenal are doing well.  They couldn’t take the notion that we were the second best club in the last two thirds of last season, nor that we doing rather well in recent matches played 

Nor can they take it that Tottenham are in a bit of a pickle, for not only have they lost three in a row, as Arsenal have done this season, as well as winning three in a row, they were not quite as good as we were in the last campaign.

Perhaps part of the reason for the media’s not wanting to do any comparisons is that the media went rather overboard on a collection of 1-0 wins…

Date	Match	Res	Score	Competition
5 Aug	Tottenham Hotspur v Manchester City	W	1-0	Premier League
22 Aug	Wolverhampton Wands v Tottenham Hots	W	0-1	Premier League
29 Aug	Tottenham Hotspur v Watford	W	1-0	Premier League

Now they are the outcasts, the hopeless case – not least because those 1-0 victories are a little overshadowed by the fact that they have let in three goals in each of their September outings…

11 Sep	Crystal Palace v Tottenham Hotspur	L	3-0	Premier League
19 Sep	Tottenham Hotspur v Chelsea	L	0-3	Premier League
26 Sep	Arsenal v Tottenham Hotspur	L	3-1	Premier League

But could anything have tipped the journalists off so that they didn’t quite make such awful chumps of themselves predicting as they did in August the return of the glory glory days at the THStad, while suggesting that Mr Arteta was about to get the sack?

In contemplating this we might consider what the BBC were saying about Tottenham after those three staggeringly amazing 1-0 victories…

“There was a feeling of buoyancy as Spurs emerged before kick-off, with Kane in particular receiving a rousing reception from the home supporters.   And that positivity was still sweeping around the stadium at full-time with a 300th Premier League home win in the bag.

“While newly promoted Watford are likely to have disparate objectives for the rest of the season, Spurs’ victory and performance sets them up nicely for a challenging run of fixtures when the Premier League resumes.   London derbies against Crystal Palace, Chelsea and Arsenal are next on the agenda for Nuno’s side.

“And aside from the relief of keeping Kane – their main goalscoring threat – they also appear to have become more solid in defence since Nuno arrived in the summer….”

So how could an organisation such as the BBC get this all so horribly and utterly wrong in every single regard?

Well, they could have asked a question, such as “how were Tottenham doing in the latter part of last season?”

And then they might have asked themselves, what did Tottenham spend their time doing in the summer?  The answer was that in essence they appeared to spend much of it arguing with their leading goalscorer.  They could have spent time considering the oddities of refereeing in the Premier League, or lining up a new player, but no.  They knew best.

But the fact is that Tottenham have media friends – big time.  So before 2021/22 started if Tottenham people looked at the media they would only have had good news.  Which is curious because Arsenal had just ended the 2020/21 season with a run that took them to second place across the last two thirds of the season – and all they got was bad news and predictions of Arteta’s leaving.

Indeed the summer of 2020 had most of the media telling us that this was going to be the season that Tottenham would “end the trophy drought” and curiously they are doing that again for this season, although the trophy most seem to have in mind is the Europa Conference.

There is a particular problem now for Tottenham, because as the media won’t ever admit that Arsenal could be any good at anything, the only reason that Tottenham lost 3-1 at Arsenal Stadium was that their own “first-half performance so disastrously awful, so utterly abject in every possible way, that it has to prompt a list of questions about how things have come to this. How could it be so easy for Arsenal to cut through Tottenham at every opportunity? What were the Spurs players trying to do on the pitch?” as the Athletic put it.

So although I often despair at the raging negativity towards Arsenal that is shown in the media, there is also a danger in the reverse.  Because no one looked at their defeats to Aston Villa and to Leeds at the end of last season, no one realised that Tottenham really were not performing very well last year.

Which is why looking at a run of recent matches is rather interesting, even when the run takes into account the end of one season and the start of the next.

If we look at the last ten matches played, Tottenham Hots are 13th, below Leeds and Watford.  That’s the warning sign that would have told anyone interested, that the club are not doing very well.