- Arsenal in dire straits with naff strategies and no solution in sight.
- PGMO remains the problem, and the problem just got worse
By Tony Attwood
First an advert. I recorded a radio programme a few days ago with a couple of the guys from BBC Radio 5 Live and it is being broadcast on that channel on Sunday 2 February at 10.30am. The subject is “North London Forever” which you may know is on the home page of this site, and I’ve added it to the end of this little piece, just in case you wanted to hear the full version.
So if you listen to the Radio 5 programme, you will then know what the voice of the guy who keeps writing all these articles actually sounds like. (There’s more about the song in the intro to the audio at the end of this piece).
Anyway onto more pressing matters….
Of course, as every semi-sensible person would know that Arsenal are not in panic mode as our chums at Tottenham are (or at least ought to be – although sometimes I still get the impression that they actually think everything is going fine).
But on the other hand, the Sun either doesn’t employ semi-sensible people or doesn’t think there are any semi-sensible people out there reading the Sun, or both (and they are probably right). So they can tell us that “Mikel Arteta [is] consulting Arsenal stars on which striker to sign as he desperately seeks firepower before deadline.” (Arsenal have scored two fewer goals than Tottenham, that is true. But we have 23 more points than they have, which seems to me to be more important).
But the Sun insists, “Arsenal face nightmare Champions League last 16 draw as supercomputer projects four most likely Gunners opponents.”
That’s possibly the same “supercomputer” as made a pretty average fist of predicting how the first set of games would end up. So when they tell us that “Arsenal could face a nightmare draw in the next round of the Champions League” the key word is “could”. (The draw actually takes place tomorrow).
Anyway, according to the “Football Rankings‘ supercomputer” which doesn’t actually exist, “those four teams are most likely to be Sporting Lisbon, Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and Juventus.” Meanwhile, according to the Untold Arsenal editorial team (which also doesn’t exist) this is a load of codswallop.
There is in fact an arrogance about both the Sun and Fifa that I find incredibly hard to accept, and in the case of the Fifa they have announced that they have rejected a request from the African Regional Organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation which represents 18 million African workers, to increase the protection of migrant workers in the building of new stadia for the world cup. Fifa says measures are already in place, implying that nothing went wrong the last time they did something like this. Besides which, it is not as if Saudi Arabia had any sort of “alarming record” on human rights!!!
So they now tell us that Fifa say that they already have guarantees from the Saudis and that these were in their bid for the World Cup, which apparently includes “a workers’ welfare system”. So that’s all right then – we can take Saudi’s word for it. Except I can’t anymore than I can accept the word of the British government, or come to that Donald Trump. And that for one reason: rulers and politicians lie.
.Apparently there are around 10 million migrant workers already in Saudi Arabia and the argument appears to be that since they are not making a fuss, everything is fine and the 11 promised new stadia will be built along with 200,000 hotel rooms.
Personally I am sure Fifa knows what it is doing, just as they did last time. But it is interesting that a recent study in Nature Human Behaviour tells us that it is now possible to measure dishonesty. They did this by working with more than 21,000 participants from the UK and USA.
Each person completed a set of online tasks to earn money, and then were asked to report how much they had made, saying at the same time this income would need to be taxed at a rate of 35%.
But in the test it was possible for the volunteer participants to lie about their earnings, which then would obviously reduce the amount of tax that they had to pay, without any repercussions. They were also asked to make an honesty oath, although this varied from person to person, and some were offered no oath at all. Some of the oaths were dead simple (“I hereby declare” etc) and some were complex talking about responsibility etc. Some were made before the task started, some at the end.
Around a quarter of those involved lied in order to reduce their tax and a third said they had earned nothing at all. So there’s a simple piece of information. People in all sorts of circumstances lie. But we are being asked to believe statements from Saudi Arabia as we were previously asked to believe statements from Qatar.
I don’t think I’ll be watching the world cup. I do however rather like listening to North London Forever.
Well, this caught me off guard. I thought I was the only one wiping tears from my eyes, then I saw a lad in this video doing just that same thing. Could not have picked a better Anthem for the club. And now that I know the story behind it, it only goes to resonate that much more with me.