Wolverhampton v Arsenal: the team, the prediction and the mindless twaddle

 

 

• Wolverhampton v Arsenal: the goals, the history, the injuries
• Wolverhampton v Arsenal: the strange case of the referees
• Wolverhampton v Arsenal. The team that can tackle and foul without fear
• Wolverhampton v Arsenal – home, away and discipline

By Bulldog Drummond

According to The Guardian, Wolves can rise to occasion” and of course as we all know pretty much anything is possible.  But what would be helpful is something from a journalist who predicts this sort of thing by way of reasoning and logic as to why the journo thinks this will happen – without simply making up some bonkers fact on the way.

The Guardian article goes on to say that the “injuries to forwards… have blunted their [Wolverhampton’s] razor-sharp attack.”   And I have to admit I couldn’t recall Wolverhampton having a razor-sharp attack, so I decided to go back and have a look.  Had something really gone wrong in the past few weeks, or even months with my memory?  Or the Wolverhampton attack?  Or both?  Well, yes most likely it had, but even so.  A “razor sharp attack” for Wolverhampton Wanderers?  It seemed a little unlikely.  But still according to the newspaper “Ben Fisher covers football in the Midlands,” so I am sure he knows more than me.

To find out more about my declining memory and overall mental state, I looked at the league table at it stood on 1 January which showed Wolverhampton 11th in the league with the 10th highest number of goals.  Not much razor sharpness there.

So thinking maybe I hadn’t gone far enough back, I plodded on my chosen research course, but no on 1 December last year they were 11th in the goal scoring table. As they were on 1 November.  As they were on 1 October.    Going back to 1 September might be a bit unfair but I did just check in case the “razor sharp attack” had been present at the very start, but no on that date Wolverhampton Wanderers were the 15th highest scoring team.

The fact is that Wolverhampton may have injuries but at no time this season have they had anything even vaguely resembling a razor-sharp attack of which the Guardian speaks.

But I still had the thought that maybe I was being unfair.  Maybe it was all happening the season before that and I didn’t notice.   Yet here again checking the league table on 1 December 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers far from having a razor sharp attack the club had the lowest-scoring team in the league.  And although they recovered a bit by the end of the 2022/23 season they still ended up with only the 13th highest-scoring club, 63 goals behind the top club.

So what we have again is another piece of total journalistic twaddle, slipped into a newspaper without any evidence (of course) because there is none in the hope that we will all accept what is said without question.   In short it is made-up nonsense.added to the paper because the editors think football readers are morons.

And that’s what we get all the time.  Take for example, Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal in danger of becoming like Mauricio Pochettino’s nearly team at Tottenham recently in the Telegraph.  Arsenal finished 8 points ahead of Tottenham last season.   At the moment Arsenal are 11 points above Tottenham.  The similarity with Tottenham is non-existent.

Using other stats, last season Arsenal finished second to Tottenham’s 8th.  In 2022 Tottenham were indeed two points above Arsenal at the end of the season,and in 2021 the clubs finished within a point of each other.  But it took Arsenal sliding down to 8th in the League for two seasons for Tottenham to get above Arsenal and even then Arsenal managed to win the FA Cup in passing.  But Arsenal were doing a total rebuild and getting rid of top players like Ozil and Aubameyang and Lacazette at the time.

In fact, Arsenal are also only three goals away from getting their highest ever away goals tally ever in the Premier League. But that didn’t get a mention.

So why this ceaseless, remorseless desire to knock Arsenal, even when it means using utterly made-up “facts”?   It is of course a journalistic thing, and it runs alongside the desire never to criticise or question PGMO.   When the season is over I think we’ll try and look into it further.

As for now there seems to be a fair amount of agreement that the Arsenal team could read

David Raya,

Ben White, William Saliba, Gabriel, Oleksandr Zinchenko,

Martin Oedegaard, Jorginho, Declan Rice,

Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz, Gabriel Jesus.

So there we are.  The match begins later on, because of TV’s demands.  But you probably knew that.   However whatever the commentators say, if you are watching it on TV, just remember, 95% of what they say is likely to be untrue and the other 5% irrelevant.  Just don’t get taken in by it all is my advice.