Leicester v Arsenal, Tottenham’s slippage, Arsenal wild rumours

• Leicester v Arsenal: the referee and the bias
• Leicester City v Arsenal: Arsenal play a club that is actually worse than Tottenham
• Leicester v Arsenal. The worst vs the best League team in the last 10 games

One of the things that virtually never ever delivers anything positive in football is when supporters of a club start attacking the owners or directors of that club.   What does happen is that the directors and/or owners hunker down, and start spending money on PR and the like rather than on improving the team.

Which is why it is so great to see the Guardian reporting today that, “Fans turn on Levy as Tottenham face new low in familiar cycle of failure”.   The subheading tells us that “Supporters protest again at chairman’s culture of ‘profit before glory’ but so far they are sparing beleaguered manager Ange Postecoglou.”

Of course, there are some Arsenal supporters who constantly turn on the club’s manager and owners although I think attacks on the directors are far less common than some clubs get, and indeed in recent years attacks on Arteta on anything other than the “obvious” need to buy a striker have been rare.   But the Totts are 14th in the table, so have nothing much to fall back on by way of excuse, other than the fact that the media predicted they would get into the top four this campaign.

But from 22 December to today Tottenham have played eight league games and won just one of them – that against Brentford.   Their last two cup matches have been a 0-4 league cup defeat to Liverpool and a 1-2 FA Cup defeat to Aston Villa.

The media love supporter protests of course and will give this one a lot of publicity I am sure, but given the past behaviour of the owners I am not at all sure that this protest will do anything in terms of improving matters.  But of course I am sure Tottenham supporters know what they are doing.

On the other hand it was amusing to get a note recently saying I was fixated on Tottenham.  I am not really sure that is quite right, as  I’d say I am “amused by” rather than “fixated by”, that funny club, and either way I  am not sure it matters.

So today we have Leicester away, and their doings of late have been detailed in earlier articles (see links at the top).

As for Arsenal, Mikel Arteta said yesterday, “We have played without Gabriel Magalhães, without William Saliba, Ben White all season, TakehiroTomiyasu all season, Riccardo Calafiori for two months, Mikel Merino for two months, Martin Ødegaard for two months, Bukayo Saka for three months, Gabriel Jesus … all of them.”   That of course is true, and it is also true that Arsenal are second in the league despite all that.   Which with any other club would lead to numerous articles about how incredible it is to be second amidst all these injuries, but this is Arsenal, so no, we don’t get that.  So instead it’s down to us.  Here’s the table

And yet I don’t recall any celebratory articles saying how amazing it is that Arsenal are doing so well, with such an injury run this season.  But then, that’s the media for you.

Interestingly, Arteta did comment on one of the latest wild rumours – this one saying that Saka had suffered a setback in his recovery.  He said it was still “too early” to say when Saka would be back but did confirm that the setback story was utter fantasy. He also confirmed that Ben White is back in the squad for today’s game.

As for the squad “crisis” that the media is talking up each day, the latest whizzo idea is that Arsenal could sign a free agent this week.  This story of course has two benefits for the media.  One is that it gives them something to write about today without bothering with that time-consuming research nonsense, and then next week they can come back either with an “As we predicted” story of who Arsenal have signed or else an “Arsenal fail to sign striker” tale, when there is no evidence the club was even trying to sign a free agent.   Oh yes and there is also the story that Saliba could be used as a centre forward.

Next up, the team.