By Tony Attwood
- Man C accept their latest punishment: what does that tell us?
- Arsenal lose to Liverpool in pre-season friendly, but the stars were against them
There is a story in Le Matin which I don’t think has made the English papers (largely on the ground that it is a story about foreigners, and as we know English people are not interested in what foreigners get up to, because, well, they are not English) which is about the threats that Angel di Maria has faced as he attempted to end his career as a footballer, playing in his home town of Rasario.
Immediately the idea was put forward Di Maria was threatened. Or at least his family was threatened. As a result Di Maria gave up any thought of playing in Argentina again.
Speaking of the situation, he said,”There was this box thrown in front of my sister’s store: a pig’s head with a bullet in its forehead and a note saying that if I returned to Central (the Rosario club), the next head would be that of my daughter Pia,”
The story was kept secret until members of the family had been given a chance to get out of the area.
And we should remember here that appalling and unacceptable as such a threat would be against any human, this guy is a world champion with the Argentine national team. He previously has played with Real Madrid, Manchester United, Juventus and Paris Saint Germain.
Rosario has of late become a city of increasing violence and drug dealing and there are troops patrolling the region. So yes it is a dangerous area, but now it seems it is also an area where footballers can be threatened and so removed.
It’s not like that in England – at least not yet, but the country can move in either direction. So I wonder what reception Emile Smith Rowe will get when he turns out for Fulham against Arsenal. I would hope it would be a round of applause from Arsenal fans – he wanted to stay at Arsenal as far as I can see, and he sat patiently through a season on the sidelines not making a fuss… although of course I may have missed some of the news.
But in essence, he had injuries and lost is place but did what the club wanted when it wanted it. There should be no negativity.
And yet as far as I can see the hatred and negativity is growing all the time. When it reaches fever pitch the media condemn it, but their own attacks on players and managers do nothing but encourage it, because the media sees negativity as great for trade.
Yet the point about football is that it is always a gamble. Take Manchester United: their winning the FA Cup last season and the league cup the season before was deemed irrelevant in the light of finishing eighth in the league. And the media have really attacked Antony Santos (cost £85.6m), Romeo Lavia, Marc Cucurella and Mason Mount , just as they have attacked Mykhailo Mudryk and Moises Caicedo at Chelsea.
But then the site that went to great lengths to depict those players as failures also had a bash at Kai Havertz. Havertz was Arsenal’s second top scorer last season, but more than that his goals came mostly toward the end of the season after he had got used to the team around him.
The point is that some players are brought into a team with the instruction to carry on doing what they were doing with their previous team. Sometimes they are told to do something new. And sometimes other members of the team are told to do something new to accommodate the new member of the squad.
All these things take a bit of adjusting to, both by the player and by the rest of the team as we saw last season with Havertz. But of course some supporters and virtually all the media don’t give players ay team timeto adapt. Results are demanded at once.and that very simply doesn’t happen most of the time.
And indeed with Havertz the statistics are virtually never presented in terms of when he scored during the season – just the total number in which he scored.
In his first 16 games he scored one goal. But then in his last 20 games for Arsenal he scored ten goals. Showing, as if it ever needed to be shown, that it can take some players quite a bit of time to get the hang of their new team colleagues.
But waiting is not something the media feel they can do because they need new headlines every day..
The ones I find most appalling are the former players like Neville, Carragher and the like. They couldn’t coach a rat with a piece of cheese yet they talk a lot of nonsense. Perhaps they are paid by the word. The “real” journalists are just slightly better, pretending they know what is really going on inside clubs. That bald fellow at Sky comes to mind. Show them a table with three columns and five rows and they’d fall into a faint.